The ground hasn't stopped shaking.

At 5:58 on the morning of Saturday 15 August, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake ruptured the seabed off the north coast of Flores. It was shallow, and it was close — and across seven regencies, walls came down while families were still asleep.

By the morning of 26 August, more than 7,400 aftershocks had been recorded — 143 of them strong enough to be felt, the largest at magnitude 6.2. Indonesia's geophysics agency says the rate is beginning to decline, but still expects the sequence to run for another three to four weeks. That is why people are still sleeping in open ground — not because every home has fallen, but because nobody yet knows which walls will hold.

The hardest-hit regency is Manggarai, in the island's western highlands. Its capital, Ruteng, sits at nearly 1,200 metres — one of the coldest towns in Indonesia. Families are spending those nights on bare ground, without mattresses, without blankets.

And this landed on a province already short of water. East Nusa Tenggara is Indonesia's most water-scarce province, in the middle of its dry season and an ongoing drought. Damaged pipes and wells have taken away what little supply there was.

Indonesia's national disaster agency has said plainly that the basic needs of displaced families are not yet met — naming family tents, community kitchens, health services and medical staff as the outstanding gaps. That is the list our teams are working against.

By 25 August the national tally had reached 24,597 homes severely damaged and nearly 78,000 damaged in all, alongside 237 health facilities and 804 schools. The buildings a community leans on in a crisis are themselves part of the crisis.

On 19 August our team opened its main relief post in Nagekeo — on ground the residents themselves gave us, and helped us build. One of them put it plainly: from the residents, for the residents.

It is a community kitchen now. That same day our staff bought eggs and vegetables at the local market, cooked, and carried the first hot meal packs out to families sheltering in the camps.

That is one post, in one regency. The plan our assessment set out — community kitchens, food packages, clean water, hygiene kits, emergency shelter, and medical and psychosocial care — has to reach across seven, prioritising the villages that landslides have cut off from the main roads.

What stands between that plan and a family eating tonight is funding. Every contribution goes straight into it.