I refer, of course, to to the tragedy in Doha that claimed the lives of the New Zealand triplets. Rather than the mawkish tripe the Herald pushes, I wish to link here to the Blog site No Minister. From Psycho Milt whose suspicions are backed up in The Gulf Blog:
It’s worth considering that the building standards in other countries may not be up to the same level as those in our home country and MFAT may have a role to play in alerting NZ citizens of this. Well before the 2022 world cup.
My family have been New Zealand expats since last New Years Eve. We’ve been living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have been irreconcilably and immovably homesick but I have busied myself organizing schools and preschools for our five children.
I carry with me the conviction that America is a place that knows how to do things properly. I haven’t enquired too thoroughly about the safety practices. I have established in each institution we have visited, that there are emergency procedures; we have supplied emergency contacts to schools and I have assumed that should an emergency happen, the buildings would be up to a certain standard to prevent the spread of fire and mitigate the effect of an earthquake. I trusted the carers would be well versed in the escape plans, and my children would escape any threat.
I will never assume again. I have a set of twins and a three year old booked into a local KinderCare tomorrow and today when dropping my three year old to their preschool, I eyeballed the sprinkler system, established the presence of smoke alarms and bailed up the centre director. The fire escape plan was practiced only two days ago and they have had one incident where nearby construction set off the alarms so I am now confident of their safety when in Kindercare.
I should have done this already. I had examined their “unusual incident”, register but had an uneasy feeling I had left something out for examination. Their fire safety procedures. I had blogged before about establishing a fire safety plan when staying in new houses, but my natural assumption is that a centre would have to be dreadfully remiss for childcare facilities to not meet standards that would contain a fire and not to have a fire escape plan that is regularly practiced. Any parent would never imagine that this Doha type of horror could occur.
Poor poor parents. to loose so much so quickly.
There is a special type of bond with multiples. You have your parent-child bond and you have the relationship between the children and reflected back to you.
I pray on occasion though I am not particularly religious as much as experimental. On this occasion I pray that the parents feel the bond with their children as strongly as they ever have and this stays with them in their grief. Our deceased may have departed but they still fish in another stream.
