Guidance note on recovery: telling live lessons

This guidance note shares 'live lessons' learnt - told through first-person stories - that contribute to disaster preparedness, mitigation, and a recovery that builds back better. It asserts that telling live lessons have great value as a way to create monuments and memorials, and can be transformative and therapeutic activities for individuals and whole communities.

The following categories are intended to give an idea of the broad range of strategies and approaches that can be employed to share the lessons of disaster: (i) Museums; (ii) Preservation of Physical Disaster Damage; (iii) Memorials and Monuments; (iv) Memory Transfer; (v) Storytelling; and (vi) Folk Media.

There are 31 cases about Algeria, Bangladesh, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Japan, Nepal, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Taiwan (China), Thailand, Turkey, and the United States of America. These cases deal with different hazards (cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes).

The inspiration for this document came from the stories that were shared during the TeLL-Net International Forum on Telling Live Lessons from Disasters Kobe, Japan in March 2010.