Your babysitter's family is stranded on the roof of a flooded building in the Philippines. What do you do?

Thursday October 8, 6:30 a.m., the phone rings. I pick up sleepily. "My family! My family! Magda … my family!" I hear sobbing and low, sad groans on the other end. It is our babysitter, Maricel, originally from the Philippines, where two typhoons--"Ondoy" and "Pepeng," as they are known locally--have caused floods that, over the last few weeks, have killed hundreds, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and inflicted damage estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Almost seven years ago, when her son was 15 months old, Maricel made the difficult choice to leave him with her parents so that she could make money in America. Now she tells me that her seven-year-old son, her parents, her sister, and several of her nieces, aunts, and cousins are stranded on the second floor of a shaky 200-year-old house on her family's farm compound, about a five-hour drive from Manila. Night is falling, and the water is rising. The single-level home in which her son lives with her parents has been severely damaged.

I check the news: The conditions are bad and getting worse. People are dying in the floods, assistance can't get through, resources are scarce. The U.N. appeal for the Philippines raised maybe a quarter of its $74 million target. So there they sit, 19 people in an unstable, largely wooden structure, with no flotilla of lifeboats or helicopters from well-to-do countries headed their way.

And here I sit, an attorney in New Jersey. Can I save a poor family in a rural disaster zone thousands of miles away? I am about to find out--and, as the flood waters rise, time is of the essence.

The E-mail Plea