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[David Gil]

Dear fellow linguists and friends,

As you know, the Indian Ocean region has been hit by a natural disaster of
horrific proportions.  The worst hit area was the province of Aceh in northern
Sumatra, where nearly 100,000 perished and many more have been left homeless.
We, a group of friends of Indonesia and Indonesian aid specialists, have
organized an informal relief effort to help alleviate the survivors'
suffering.  The reason we have decided to act is that government agencies and
large aid organizations have been focusing on refugee centers, while most of
the victims have sought refuge with relatives, and are therefore not reached by
normal channels.

A member of our group, Azwar Hasan, has just returned from Aceh to Jakarta,
bringing stories of horror but also of hope.  Azwar, a community aid specialist
and a native of Aceh, has set up a distribution network of trusted volunteers
in areas affected by the disaster.  Based on his and other Indonesian friends’
advice, we are sending a small team of community workers to Medan, the largest
city in Sumatra, which has not been affected by the disaster despite its
proximity to Aceh.  The team will purchase emergency supplies there, and
proceed to Aceh in guarded convoys.  This will ensure that the supplies safely
reach the people who need them most.

If you would like to make a contribution, you may send it by PayPal to our US
contact person, Dr. Lera Boroditsky (Stanford University), at the following
email address:

lera at psych.stanford.edu

(For those of you unfamiliar with PayPal, it is a means of sending money
internationally to anybody with an email account.  PayPal is accessible on the
web at www.paypal.com.)

If you would like to contribute by ordinary bank transfer, please make it to
our Indonesia contact person, Dr. Uri Tadmor (Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology and Atma Jaya University):

BCA (Bank Central Asia)
Plaza Sentral Branch
Jl. Jendral Sudirman Kav. 47
Jakarta 12930, Indonesia
Account number: 4411163631
Account swift code: CENAIDJA
Account name: Uri Tadmor

Finally, a special note to participants in the upcoming international
conferences in West Sumatra (ALT VI  in Padang, ISMIL 9 in Maninjau).  The
areas where the conferences will be held have not been affected by the
disaster, and we fully intend to hold the conferences as planned.  This will
show our support to the people of Sumatra in their time of need, and will also
give a small yet meaningful boost to the island’s economy.

Updates on our relief efforts will appear periodically on the ALT and ISMIL
websites.

Uri Tadmor and David Gil