Mother nature

The United States is today marking the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting the Gulf coast, killing more than 1,800 people.  The famous jazz city of New Orleans was worst affected.  It was incredible to see such suffering in the richest country on earth.  The catastrophe exposed the massive divide between wealth and poverty in the U.S.  The world was also surprised by how slowly and ineffectually the George W. Bush administration provided help.

I have been to New Orleans only once, with your grandmother Veronica in 1986 – the year your father was born, when we were living in New York City.  It’s a lovely place where I hope you will go one day.

Unfortunately Hurricane Katrina caused a massive flood, wiping away tens of thousands of homes.  In spite of how horrible it was, it now looks tame compared to the terrible scenes in Pakistan that we are now seeing on our TV screens.

The juxtaposition of these two wild weather catastrophes clearly shows that Mother Nature doesn’t seem to discriminate between rich and poor.  But the difference will be that Pakistan will take far longer to recover than did the U.S.

Tomorrow I leave for my sixth trip to Asia to Asia.  I plan to go to the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Wednesday where today a volcano erupted after 400 years of inactivity.  But Sumatra is massive, and I will be going somewhere far away from the Sinabung. 

After the chaos that Iceland’s erupting Eyjafjallajokul volcano had on European flights in April makes me slightly nervous. Most of Europe's airspace was closed for nearly a week.  I was stranded for six nights in Singapore because of the ash it so inconveniently belched out into the atmosphere. Not being the most patient of people, I was climbing up my hotel walls trying to find a way to get back to Europe.  So fingers crossed that the Sumatran hurricane will be kind.

Grandpa Jonathan

Prague, Czech Republic