Haiti

The juxtaposition of internal ad for "Lady Gaga's stylist" and the headlines about the disaster at the NYTimes home page is disturbing: Real pain on one side of the page and nihilist nonsense on the other.

I feel helpless here, because I am. The airport is closed for lack of fuel and places to park planes--and airplanes, for all their speed, can't bring as much as ships can. And the ships take time to get there.

They need bulldozers and trucks and water tankers and somebody to put down the armed gangs looting, and they need medics and somebody to organize helpers. There are plenty of Haitians to dig and care for the wounded, they just need supplies and organization and someplace to do the jobs. And nobody in our family speaks the language (just some French--nobody knows Creole). If I were there I'd just be in the way.

It didn't occur to me until I was talking this over with a fellow down the hall that because Haiti has no trees left, the shanty-towns are made of cement blocks. I'm surprised, because cement blocks cost money. Could it be that using concrete block was part of a plan to improve the housing? The bigger buildings were hard hit: schools, hospitals, churches, government, aid groups--Doctors Without Borders lost all three hospitals.

Haiti gets a big quake about every hundred years--I wonder where else in the Caribbean is at risk. Quakes and volcanoes seem to be related in the region, coming in clusters even when the sites are hundreds of miles apart. I suppose somewhere one could find the data to assemble a map of historical earthquakes in the region and try to guess where's the highest risk areas--and then see how quake-resistant the buildings are (probably about the same as Haiti's).

(I wish Deuteronomy 18:20 didn't have to be relevant to the topic today. I don't think God is pleased with self-appointed prophets.) This earthquake was forseeable, as are others: Puerto Rico is overdue for a big one, probably with a tsunami to go with it. Are they ready? Maybe that's a way to help...