Process Essay

A few years ago my husband and I decided that we wanted to have an emergency kit in our home. Leaders in my religion have been asking us to try and prepare 72 hour kits to have in case of disaster, and it can never hurt to be prepared.  I know a lot of people who do have them already but we had never taken the time to make our own. There is a basic order of what should go into a disaster kit and then people decide what will or will not work for them, we decided to just take a section at a time. First we had to decide on whether to make my own kit or if we should just buy a pre-made kit. Then we had to think about what exactly we felt necessary to have in our kit.  Lastly, we had to figure out how much money we were willing and able to spend to make our kit.

The first step of this process was choosing whether to make our own 72 hour kit or to buy a already made packaged kit. I did a little on-line research and quickly realized that if we bought a pre-constructed kit that we would probably want to make some adjustments anyway just to accommodate to our family needs. Considering the price of the pre-made kits are significantly higher than what we wanted to pay it seemed a no brainer for us to prepare our own. This first step of was a easy one for us, we didn't have to do much research to realize that making our own kit was the choice for us.

 The second step was the true decision making part. We had to decide what we wanted in our kit. We came across a statement made by FEMA which reads like this   "The first 72 hours after a disaster are critical. Electricity, gas, water and telephones may not be working. In addition, public safety services such as police and fire departments may not be able to reach you immediately during a serious crisis. Each person should be prepared to be self-sufficient – able to live without running water, electricity and/or gas, and telephones – for at least three days following a disaster." This statement really struck a chord with us and it was clear that we don't have any clue what we would need, use or want in a situation of disaster. We found a good web-site and decided on using these four categories: Food & Water, First Aid, Tools, Hygiene.

The third and final major step of planning how to make our 72 hour kit was figuring just how much money we were willing ( and able) to put into this. We had already decided that we weren't comfortable spending a ton of money when we chose to make our own kit. We decided to find a average price of the pre-made kits and make it our goal to come in under that amount by $100. We usually pride ourselves in being frugal but we felt like something as important as this needed a good chunk of money invested. Our final amount put in came in at $ 131 for a family of 5.

Choosing to make a 72 hour kit for our family was a easy one. We feel so much better knowing that we are as prepared as we can be in case of disaster. I know that this does not mean that we will be better off than any other person or persons if a disaster actually happens but it does give us peace of mind knowing that we did as much as we could ahead of time to prepare. Now a days there are so many zombie and apocalyptic movies, books and tv shows that you can kind of work yourself up into a nervous wreck. This was something that did take a chunk of our free time do initiate, research and actually conquer but in the end it was worth it because I feel a huge weight of my shoulders because of it.