Happy New Year to you all! We really will try and get a whole load more photos up on here by Tuesday - it would be worth clicking the December archive link once we've done that, and having a check through the last thhree weeks or so.
We're 1000km inland, 1500m above sea level and a good few hundred metres above the placid Lake Victoria. There are very few Kenyan tourists (ever) in Thailand, Indonesia or Sri Lanka. One Kenyan died in the tsunami (at Watamu, the town on the coast where we'd stayed), and the tidal wave was the front page story for one, maybe two days in the national papers here - since then it hasn't been off page 12 (World News), but it hasn't reached the front page again.
From the little bits of the BBC World Service, CNN and UK news websites that we come across, and from personal contact with people at home, I think you have much more saturation coverage. It's odd to witness this from afar: from here it's a big tragedy and a very unusual geological event - but boring old avoidable starvation, AIDS and water-borne diseases still kill a lot more 'over this side' (as the Kenyans say). Not to mention wars...
- Mark
3 comments:
HAPPY NEW YEAR PPL!!! :)
Happy 2005 y'all
Apparently, the americans armed with a couple of hours forwarning of the Tsunami, wired to a uk 'owned' island air base they occupy somewhere in the indian ocean to get their planes in the air for the duration. Sadly, they forgot to share on the pretext they weren't sure who to contact.
This is the Diego Garcia airbase story. Actually, the true story is a bit different but equally troubling, that everyone in the international scientific community who routinely monitor earthquakes knew right away that a large tsunami was a distinct possibility, and NOAA (who run satellites that monitor the oceans) also knew right away. Both groups tried to call people but didn't know who to, so they tried scientific colleagues in countries like India and Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. In turn, they tried various people in governments, and were uniformly brushed off - or were informed that there was no process by which people could be alerted.
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