The death toll after yesterday's earthquake in the Indian Ocean has climbed to about 23,000. The hardest-hit nations (India, Thailand, Indonesia) are also home to some of the poorest and most-densely populated people on earth, which makes this number merely an educated guess. Indonesian government officials have suggested that Indonesia alone may have sustained this many deaths.
And according to BBCOnline, about a million people are now homeless in this region. About a million. Million is a number. We hear about budgets and lawsuit penalities of $1.8 million or half a million. You can't just say "about a million." Saying "about a million" implies quite a large margin of error. Saying "about a million" means you don't really know how many people no longer have a house. If I say about 10, I might mean 6 or 7. I could even mean 12 or 13. How can we understand maybe 600,000 or maybe 1,300,000 people homeless? How can we put that number into our frame of reference?
"About a million are now homeless." It was the most compelling line in the whole article, I think. As the floodwaters recede, typhoid, dengue fever, dysentery, and a whole host of other killers will flow in to take their place. And they will begin with the homeless, of course.
Who was it that said, "weep with those who weep?"
Posted by nickles at December 28, 2004 12:00 AMWhile by no means intending to diminish the magnitude of this tragedy - on Sunday my priest devoted much time to it - it is worth pointing out that the difference between homeless and not is a lot smaller in Southeast Asia than it is here. There's a reason that 97% of deaths due to natural disaster come from the Third World, and that reason has little to do with the number of disasters. The real tragedy here is not so much that so many people have died with thousands more about to do so, but that the difference between these conditions and the normal conditions are so small.
Posted by: ryan at December 28, 2004 08:17 AMOf course. It's not as if a homeless person in Southeast Asia is much worse off than a person who lives in a cardboard and scrap metal hovel. You're right to say that the definition of "normal" living conditions in this region is tragic. This is one more reason the numbers are difficult to understand, to fit into our frame of reference.
Posted by: bob at December 28, 2004 06:22 PM