History
On April 4, 1975, a U.S. jet carrying 243 Vietnamese orphans crashed into the jungle outside of Tan Son Nhut. A third of the children died in the accident; the surviving children, many critically injured, awaited rescue. The United States government announced that it would not have rescue resources available for at least 10 days.
Robert Macauley, at one time a college roommate of George H. W. Bush, decided to respond on his own; he chartered a Boeing 747 to rescue the orphans, mortgaging his house to cover the costs. Within 48 hours, the children arrived safely in California. AmeriCares was created upon on this emergency. Robert Macauley explained his purpose to offer immediate and effective aid, "You act now and worry about the red tape later".
AmeriCares has provided emergency medical relief in response to numerous disasters, including the famine in Ethiopia (1984); the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986); the Armenian earthquake (1988); Central America’s Hurricane Mitch (1998); the Rwandan refugee crisis (1994); the attack on the World Trade Center (2001); the South Asian tsunami (2004); the Pakistan earthquake (2005); Hurricane Katrina (2005); the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur; the earthquake in China (2008), Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (2008), Sumatra Indonesia earthquake (2009) and typhoons in the Philippines (2009).
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)