Although they are one of my clients, somehow I never discovered their Open Homes program, which was started in 2012. Today I happen to see it in two different messages, specific to the wildfires occurring in Napa and Sonoma. One of my cohorts whose family lives in Napa has been temporarily displaced as they had to evacuate yesterday.
The smokey smell still lingers in the city even after a few days. We learned to create a program to tweet a Markov chain using the Twitter API. While it may be such a simple thing to software engineers, it got some of us so excited to be able to see how technology and bots work. While I had an appreciation for how technology has been able to simplify our lives, seeing the effort under the hood has granted me a very different appreciation for not only the software engineers behind the user interface that we see but also the creators and innovators that do what AirBnb has implemented.
Linking hosts with evacuees in moments of disasters, whether hurricanes, wildfires, mass shootings or other emergencies, to open up homes, rooms and beds and offer short-term stays for free simplifies acts of kindness in very stressful situations. In the chaos of evacuating, my cohort's friend had to leave her dog behind as people were asked to leave luggage and pets behind to prioritize people in the rushed madness. Luckily the next day as she went back, she was able to locate her fuzzy family member.
After all these years of getting advice to rent out my in-law unit, I finally signed up with AirBnb to host any evacuees unfortunately displaced from the wine country wildfires.
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