Mother nature

Nepal has been the scene of an unmitigated disaster. When we first heard of the earthquake that had hit Kathmandu we thought how lucky we had been for Angela to have spent a month there and returned home only two weeks beforehand. Life is a throw of the dice when you move away from the security of your home surroundings and having taken all the foreseeable precautions one can still be tripped up by an event no one predicted.
Every day the death toll rises and it is only now do we see the devastation further down the Kathmandu Valley. Whole villages smashed by the systemic shaking, people crushed under the rubble. And now with water in short supply and food running out the Nepalese authorities are out of their depth trying to cope.

In years gone by we in the West would not have known of the disaster, weeks would have elapsed before the full extent of the trouble revealed its self and still longer before help could have reached them. At least in these days of Internet connection,the same connection I was happily chatting to my daughter over as she arrived amidst the problems of the plane which had run off the runway in Kathmandu and had caused her to be holed up in Delhi, this same internet now brings us the reality and the extent of the disaster.

These so called natural disasters are a reminder of the fragility of the world we live in and make us aware of how vulnerable people are to nature. Climate change is predicted, temperatures set to rise only a few percent but sufficient to alter the natural climate patterns which, apart from causing the ice cap to melt pushing the sea levels up, also will make areas that grow certain crops unable to produce, forcing whole societies to have to search for alternatives.
Governments of the emerging industrial nations still argue and post the claim that, because the Industrial World of the 20th century, largely Europe and the USA had a hand in the creation of the pollution that led to the 'green house gas effect' they can continue to pollute until they are on a par !!! What sort of a crazy notion is that when their grandchildren will be the ones to suffer equally. There are no winners, as the earthquake in Nepal showed when Mother Nature shows her hand and reminds us of how puny we are !!!