Charity Sunday: Doctors Without Borders - #CharitySunday #conflict #emergencyresponse

We’ve reached the second Sunday of January already, which means it’s Charity Sunday once again. 

Today I’m supporting one of the organizations closest to my heart, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins sans Frontières. MSF is a network of volunteer physicians and other health professionals who provide medical and humanitarian assistance around the world, in some of the most horrific environments and desperate situations on earth. MSF volunteers bravely help people victimized by disasters and conflicts, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or political affiliation. The organization is officially neutral (a stance that has seen them expelled from some countries where they are sorely needed). In 1999 MSF was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – deeply deserved, in my opinion.

When a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti almost exactly seven years ago, MSF was there, treating the wounded and helping to prevent disease in the shanty towns of displaced Haitians. When super typhoon Haiyan slammed into the Visayas islands of the Philippines in 2013, killing more than 6000 people and affecting 11 million, MSF was on the ground in days, building field hospitals, providing clean water, serving the hordes left homeless. Today MSF is at work in the battlefields of Syria and the Central African Republic, dodging bullets as they try to meet the health and humanitarian needs of civilians fleeing from violence. In the refugee camps of Yemen and in Bangladesh, right now, MSF is battling separate epidemics of diptheria, a disease of the past that is a new threat due to shattered health systems and over-crowded living conditions.

I urge you to visit the MSF site, watch some of their videos, and consider making your own contribution. In any case, I will contribute one dollar for each comment I receive on this post.

If you want to do more, you might also consider purchasing a copy of Coming Together: In Vein, an anthology of vampire erotica and erotic romance that I edited. All sales from this book support MSF. 

 

Meanwhile, as usual, I have an excerpt to amuse you this Sunday. This bit comes from my MMF erotic romance Monsoon Fever. The book is set just after the first World War, at a tea plantation in Assam, India owned by a British couple. In this snippet, Priscilla and Jon Archer and their lawyer (soon to be lover) Anil Kumar help the people of the nearby village to deal with a landslide triggered by violent rains – exactly the sort of situation where MSF might deploy its resources. This excerpt has special poignancy given the recent, deadly mudslides in California.

Priscilla saw it first. The note was scrawled on a scrap torn from a ledger, and fastened to the dining room door frame with a nail.

“Landslide at the village. Gone to help.” The writing was barely legible, but she recognised Jon’s hand.

A landslide! Priscilla recalled the heaps of mud and rock piled by the road on the way to Gauhati. 

“We must go to them,” Anil insisted, reading over her shoulder. “A landslide can bury a whole town, or sweep it away.” He searched her face. “Do you have shovels or picks? And buckets, buckets would be useful.”

“In the utility shed, behind the house.” 

Anil was already on his way out the door.

Jon had taken most of the tools, but they found a short spade and a mattock. They grabbed them and scrambled up the slippery path toward the village, rain still washing over them in dense squalls. As they approached the site of the village, home to the plantation workers and their families, shouts filled the air. Lanterns flickered in the wet, black night.

Priscilla had visited the village several times, bringing sweets for the children and English soap for their mothers. She hardly recognised the scene of devastation before her now. There was no sign of the wooden huts that sheltered the workers. She saw only a vast sea of mud, with splintered planks and beams jutting out at odd angles. Half naked men dug frantically in the muck, looking like an army of demons in the shifting lantern-light. Children hung onto their mothers, wailing or watching the rescue efforts silent and wide-eyed. An elderly woman, tattered sari clinging to her wizened body, crouched under a tree half-crushed by a huge boulder.

Priscilla saw Jon near the far perimeter, wielding a shovel and yelling orders to the other men. She stumbled across the ex-village, the treacherous mud sucking at her feet, and threw herself into his arms.

“Darling! I was so worried.” she cried. “Are you all right?”

Jonathan held her so tight she could scarcely breathe. His chest was bare and streaked with dirt. His blond hair was black with rain and soil. “Priscilla! Thank God! I’m so glad to see you!”

“How bad is it?”

“Bad—nearly all the houses were destroyed—but it could have been much worse. Most of the villagers were up at the shrine when the hillside gave way. We think that there are only a few people buried. We’re trying to find them before it’s too late.”

“Let me help. I can dig, too.” She held up her spade. 

Jonathan looked at her for a moment, appraising her strength, then nodded. “Take the north east quadrant. Be careful—you don’t want to slice into someone that you’re trying to rescue.”

“What about me? Where do you want me?” Anil had come up behind them during their embrace.

“Anil! Wonderful! Can you organise the men working in the south west? I’m not sure that they understand everything that I’ve been telling them.”

“Certainly, I’ll do what I can.” Anil strode off toward the group that Jon had indicated.

Priscilla waded over to the area Jon had assigned to her. The Indian men eyed her curiously as she dug her spade into the saturated dirt. The mud resisted, sticky and heavy as cement, but she refused to be discouraged. She raised one spade-full, then another, scanning her expanding excavation each time for any sign of a body.

Her shovel hit some buried wood. The impact sent a jarring shock back through her shoulders. She thought that the thump sounded hollow. Priscilla dug in again, listening more carefully. Definitely hollow.

All at once, she heard a muffled cry, a human voice. “Jon! Over here, I think there’s a partly collapsed house here, and someone’s inside. Alive!”

The men swarmed over to where she was digging. “Careful now,” Jon cautioned. Don’t disturb the timbers or the whole place might collapse.” He showed them how to lift off the soil in layers, standing away from the hole so that their weight would not affect the precariously balanced ruins underneath. It took half an hour, but finally they pulled an old man out of the ground, crushed and bleeding but conscious.

A shout rang out from the other side of the mud field. Anil’s group had located another body. Priscilla went over to lend her spade to the efforts. Digging side by side with her husband and the Indian lawyer, she worked steadily to strip away nearly two feet of dirt. Underneath, they found the mangled corpse of a woman cradling an infant. The woman was beyond help. The baby, though, let out a lusty wail as the fresh air filled its lungs.

Priscilla bent down and took the naked child in her arms. It was covered with scratches and abrasions, but miraculously unharmed otherwise. A boy, perhaps six months old. He looked up at her with chocolate coloured eyes and cooed, waving his chubby limbs.

Tears streamed down Priscilla’s cheeks, mingling with the raindrops.

~ ~ ~

Please leave a comment. Every one means a dollar for Doctors Without Borders. In fact, to encourage you further, I will give away an ebook copy of Monsoon Fever to one randomly selected individual who comments on this post.

Lost in the Urabamba (#vacation #travel #peru)

Recently my guest Cara Bristol blogged about vacation disasters. In my comment, I mentioned a trip in which my husband and I were almost swept into a raging river by a landslide. Thought I'd share the full story today.

We went to Peru because, that winter, there was no snow in Austria. That fact scuttled our original vacation plans for a ski holiday. Hustling to find an alternative (I'd already secured time off from my job), we found a relatively cheap package tour to Lima. We'd had positive experiences traveling with this tour company to Jamaica. They provided airfare and lodging at a ridiculously low cost, then made their money on extras. In Jamaica it had been easy to use the hotel as a base for exploring on our own. We found out a bit late that Peru was a different sort of place altogether.

It was the early eighties, and quite frankly, the country was a mess. Vicious bands of Shining Path guerillas made overland transit perilous. Strikes and civil unrest occurred on an almost daily basis. At Lima Airport, we waited three hours for our luggage because the baggage handlers had stopped work. Rolling electricity outages afflicted the city of Lima, many regions of which we were advised to avoid due to the danger of being mugged or worse. Aside from the amazing gold museum, there wasn't much to see in Peruvian capital. In any case, we had loftier goals: Cusco and Machu Picchu.

The only practical way to Cusco was by air, and that turned out to be almost as expensive as our flight from the U.S. Nevertheless, we decided to bite the bullet and bought non-refundable round trip tickets to the old Incan capital nestled in the Andes.

Arriving in Cusco, we were informed that the narrow gauge railroad to Machu Picchu had been out of service for three weeks, due to a combination of rainy season mudslides and another strike. Apparently the strike had been settled, but it still wasn't clear whether the trains were running. We were devastated. Cusco was an astonishing place in its own right, but to come all that way and not get to see the fabled Incan terraces and the Temple of the Sun...!

Two days before we were scheduled to return to Lima, our guide told us we could catch the Machu Picchu train the following morning. We were up at six AM (a real sacrifice for my husband!) and on the train by seven. By ten AM we still hadn't left; there were new landslides blocking the tracks, we learned, that had to be cleared. When the train finally crawled out of the station, we cheered – but prematurely, as we were halted by a slide after an hour. Bulldozers were mustered, mud was cleared, the train proceeded for an hour or two, before our way was blocked once again.

Normally the trip from Cusco to the base of Huayna Picchu (only fifty miles!) takes about four hours. In our case, we didn't arrive until after four in the afternoon. The heart-stopping bus ride up the steep mountain flank, along the Hiram Bingham Highway, required another half hour. And the ruins closed at five thirty.

So we had less than an hour to explore one of the great wonders of the world. It was worth the journey, but way too short. Some members of the tour planned to stay over at the mountain-peak guest house, but our plane back to Lima left the next morning and we were worried about losing our money. In addition, my husband was showing signs of the flu. We climbed back into the bus, trundled down the side of the cliff and onto the train, and – waited.

The locomotive finally inched forward, into the inky darkness. We hadn't eaten. My husband's forehead felt hot enough to fry an egg. Although we were both exhausted, the hard wooden benches on the train were not really conducive to sleeping. I remember that trip as a kind of endless hell – creeping along the tracks that clung to the mountain side, the rain-swelled Urabamba River audible even though it was seventy feet below us. We'd stop for obstacles, wait, move, stop... My husband was hallucinating. I could have believed it was all a dream myself if I hadn't been so physically uncomfortable.

I finally must have drifted off into some kind of slumber, when an awful roar yanked me awake. The train lurched to a stop, throwing us to the sticky floor. It sounded as a building was collapsing around us.

The terrible racket finally stopped. Echoes of the tumult died away. Along with some of the other passengers, I stepped off the train to check out the situation.

A massive wall of steaming mud blocked the tracks, less than ten feet in front of the locomotive. Trees poked out of the muck at weird angles. Boulders twice as large as the stones of the Incan temples lay scattered on the narrow shelf the builders of the railroad had cut into the mountain side. As I stared in disbelief at the debris, a few more clods and pebbles clattered down from the heights on the right. Far below us, at the bottom of the cliff on the left, the rapids of the Urabamba seethed and boiled.

The railroad crew hurried us back into the train. I was in shock. If the slope had given way thirty seconds later, the train would have been buried. We might well have been swept off the track into the river coiling below.

My husband had fallen into an uneasy sleep, moaning and tossing on the unforgiving seats. As for me, I didn't close my eyes. I heard the grunt of the earth moving equipment they somehow managed to convey from further up the route, the shouts of the workmen, the background mutter of the swollen river. I was awake when the train nudged forward, rocking on its earth-dented tracks. I kept watch on my beloved, giving him water, praying his fever would break. I stared out the open window into the black night, not quite sure we'd really survived.

I watched dawn turn the terra-cotta roofs of Cusco from gray to red as we crawled down, back into the valley. We could have died. With a smidge less luck, we might have been lost in the Urabamba.

As the sun rose over the ancient city of the Incas, I found it hard to believe. I still do. Maybe the old gods were protecting us. Or maybe, that time at least, we were just lucky. 

 

Sunday Snog for Italy: The Ingredients of Bliss (#charity #disaster #giveaway)

This past Wednesday, a devastating earthquake struck a rural area in the mountainous Abruzzo region of Italy. Over 250 people are confirmed dead, while thousands have been left homeless. The centuries-old stone buildings in Amatrice and surrounding towns simply crumbled to rubble in the shock. Reconstruction is expected to take years.

My Sunday Snog today is dedicated to helping those affected by this disaster. I don’t have any stories set in Italy (got to remedy that!) so I’m giving you a sexy kiss or two from my French-themed erotic romance The Ingredients of Bliss.

Check out my excerpt below, then leave me a comment telling me what you think. For each comment I receive, I will donate one dollar to the Italian Red Cross for reconstruction.

In addition, I will randomly choose one person who comments to receive a free copy of this full length novel!

You can donate, too. Just go here:

https://www.ammado.com/fundraiser/178465

Oh, and when you’re done with my snog, do click back to Sunday SnogCentral, where Victoria Blisse has links to lots more delicious kisses.

One sexy French chef. One kinky American TV producer. One ambitious Chinese gal who thinks she wants them both. The ingredients of bliss? Or a recipe for disaster?

“Emily?” Harry’s voice boomed through the corridors, as if in answer to my thoughts.

“In here. In Dantès cell.”

Harry had to duck to get through the low doorway. “Ah. I should have figured I’d find you in a dungeon.” He smelled of sunscreen, sweat and musk. Like Pavlov’s dog, I started to get wet in response to the familiar stimulus.

I fought my rising need. “Hi, Harry. I was just about the head back…”

Before I could stop him, he’d clasped me to his chest. “I missed you, love.” He buried his nose in my wind-tousled hair, breathing deep then nibbled my ear. “You smell delicious.”

I tried to untangle myself from his arms. “I need a shower.” My laugh sounded hollow.

“That’s why you smell so good. No, actually that’s not true. You always smell good. One whiff of your magic scent and I’m hard as a rock.”

He wasn’t lying. His erection prodded my belly as he ran his hands over my curves and burrowed into the crook of my neck.

“Too bad there aren’t any iron rings or bars. You’d look so fetching, shackled to the dungeon wall.”

“Harry, come one. Be serious!” Once more I struggled against his embrace, without success. He only held me tighter. He was far stronger than I. My stomach did a dizzy little flip at this realization. “They’re probably waiting for us…”

He left off his nuzzling and gazed into my eyes. In the dim cell, his were full of shadows. “Let them wait. And I am serious, Emily. I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

I couldn’t avoid the kiss. Honestly, I didn’t want to. His mouth sealed itself to mine and his tongue forced my lips apart, claiming me. Lust roared through me, unleashed by the ferocity of his oral conquest. I tasted the sugary residue of his soft drink, the mint of his toothpaste, residual garlic and herbs from the ratatouille. His assertive male odor surrounded me, the essence of pure sex. I opened to him and let him take me. I had no choice.

He didn’t fondle my breasts or pinch my bottom or insinuate his fingers into my drenched knickers. He did nothing but kiss me, pouring every ounce of feeling into that mouth-to-mouth connection. Without the slightest stimulation, aside from his taste and smell, the firmness of his lips and the probing of his tongue, I found myself trembling on the verge of climax. Irresistible power flowed from him, overwhelming me. Helpless, lost and grateful, I let myself go.

He understood what he was doing to me. He felt my last resistance crumble. My plans, my qualms, my logic all came to nothing when faced with the intensity of his desire. And as I surrendered, the kiss changed.

Now he sipped at my mouth rather than swallowing me whole. His tongue feathered over my lips, coaxing me to let him enter. He breathed into me, warm and sweet, gentle as drifting clouds on a spring day. Holding me close, so close I could feel the heartbeat under his sweat-damp shirt, he bathed me in his devotion.

My sex still tingled and sparked, but now some other sensation swelled in my chest, a rare joy that seemed on the edge of triggering both laughter and tears.

“I love you, Emily.” His voice was rough velvet, his lips moist against my cheek. “More than I can ever say. More than I know what to do with.”

Tell him, my rational self whimpered, weaker by the instant. Tell him you’re leaving, before it’s too late.

I raised my face to his and offered him my mouth, and the truth.

“I love you, too.”

****

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Remembering

 
It's Boxing Day. You and your family are probably recovering from too much food and drink, relaxing after a deluge of visitors, or exploring your holiday gifts.

You're probably not thinking about the fact that today's the tenth anniversary of one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern times - the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami.

I live in Asia, though, and here the memory is still remarkably fresh. On the morning of December 26, 2004, an enormous earthquake measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale ruptured the earth's crust off the west coast of Sumatra, the largest island in Indonesia. Within the next few hours, waves ten meters high or more slammed into Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and a number of countries in East Africa, sweeping away settlements like so much trash, pulverizing buildings, stripping away vegetation and killing, overall, almost 230,000 people.

One can scarcely grasp that level of mortality. That's close to 100 times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attack in the US, and twice the number of Americans killed in combat during World War I. In many cases, those affected were poor villagers struggling to make a living from fishing or farming in coastal regions. Thousands of wealthy tourists fell victim, too, especially in the Andaman Sea resorts of Thailand, the Nicobar Islands and the Maldives.

I vividly remember the solemn mood at year end, 2004. New Year's festivities were cancelled. Everyone wore black. As new stories of devastation and death showed up each day, I had a scary sense of helplessness. We weren't personally affected, but we knew families who were. During those first weeks of January, I sleep-walked through my daily activities, numb with shock and grief.

I can't begin to imagine how I would have reacted if I'd lost anyone close to me in the disaster.

Three months after the quake, we traveled to the affected area in Thailand on holiday. An eerie quiet pervaded the resorts. The lovely beaches were deserted. Asians are seriously afraid of ghosts, and those wave-scoured beaches were viewed as haunted. The particular town where we stayed had been hit with no more than a glancing blow, but we still saw derelict buildings and swathes of land contaminated with sea salt.

Ten years later, there are thousands whose bodies have never been recovered. Those people simply winked out of existence that fateful day.

This probably isn't what you want to read about the day after celebrating Christmas with your family and friends. It's what's on my mind, though.

I feel simultaneously guilty and grateful about surviving.  The event made me realize just how fragile life is, how unpredictable a world we live in, and how important it is to appreciate every day we're given.
 
In this season of peace, that is what I wish, for the survivors and for those who were lost.