Amanda Faris - Missing in Sendai
It sucks that this is a post I even have to make, but passing it along. Copied from the mass email I sent out.
It's been days since Sendai, and among the tens of thousands of missing, there's a girl I know in passing. Amanda and I have never met in real life, but we read and comment on the same blog, and over the years exchanged our fair share of witty repartee (thanks to like-minded senses of humor). She has been living and teaching in Japan for the last four years. She is supposed to move home to the States in April - in just a few weeks. In one of the last posts on her blog, she was packing her books and wondering how she was going to ship them all home without it costing her her first born child, because she refused to part with them. (Sound like anyone you know?) "I have too many books. There is a deal at the post office here for shipping printed materials pretty cheaply...but I'd rather not part with them for the two months it would take them to get to me back home. There's like...thirty? Of them. I can fit them in my carry on rolly luggage though..." She is smart, funny, and always seems to take a positive approach to things, and in that spirit, her eFriends are mobilizing an effort to try and find her.
The internet is an incredible tool that has really shrunk the world - my own experiences in social networking have shown me that. I don't know how to describe my feelings - maybe amusement, maybe awe, maybe something a little more incomprehensible - when I see on Facebook that a friend I went to high school with and a friend I met in a history course at U of I were at the Louvre, in Paris, on the same day. They may have been standing next to each other at one point. Or when Facebook recommends a "mutual friend, maybe you know this person!" suggestion, and the the two friends from -my- friends list are a person who lives and works in Japan (who is thankfully okay and keeping everyone up to date with on-the-ground coverage, as it were) and a graphic artist and composer in Georgia who have never met. So it's my hope that you guys might take a moment of your time to pass this along to people you know, and hopefully they'll pass it on to people they know, and maybe, just maybe, it will find someone who knows something. It might be a needle in a haystack search, but her family hasn't given up hope, and neither have the people who have come to like and respect her. :)
Here's a news broadcast from her home town: http://www.9news.com/news/article/187104/188/Parents-desperate-for-word-from-daughter-in-Japan
Pass along, and thoughts and prayers are appreciated.
It's been days since Sendai, and among the tens of thousands of missing, there's a girl I know in passing. Amanda and I have never met in real life, but we read and comment on the same blog, and over the years exchanged our fair share of witty repartee (thanks to like-minded senses of humor). She has been living and teaching in Japan for the last four years. She is supposed to move home to the States in April - in just a few weeks. In one of the last posts on her blog, she was packing her books and wondering how she was going to ship them all home without it costing her her first born child, because she refused to part with them. (Sound like anyone you know?) "I have too many books. There is a deal at the post office here for shipping printed materials pretty cheaply...but I'd rather not part with them for the two months it would take them to get to me back home. There's like...thirty? Of them. I can fit them in my carry on rolly luggage though..." She is smart, funny, and always seems to take a positive approach to things, and in that spirit, her eFriends are mobilizing an effort to try and find her.
The internet is an incredible tool that has really shrunk the world - my own experiences in social networking have shown me that. I don't know how to describe my feelings - maybe amusement, maybe awe, maybe something a little more incomprehensible - when I see on Facebook that a friend I went to high school with and a friend I met in a history course at U of I were at the Louvre, in Paris, on the same day. They may have been standing next to each other at one point. Or when Facebook recommends a "mutual friend, maybe you know this person!" suggestion, and the the two friends from -my- friends list are a person who lives and works in Japan (who is thankfully okay and keeping everyone up to date with on-the-ground coverage, as it were) and a graphic artist and composer in Georgia who have never met. So it's my hope that you guys might take a moment of your time to pass this along to people you know, and hopefully they'll pass it on to people they know, and maybe, just maybe, it will find someone who knows something. It might be a needle in a haystack search, but her family hasn't given up hope, and neither have the people who have come to like and respect her. :)
Here's a news broadcast from her home town: http://www.9news.com/news/article/187104/188/Parents-desperate-for-word-from-daughter-in-Japan
Pass along, and thoughts and prayers are appreciated.