Introspection

The recent tsunami which hit many counties in South Asia is supposed to be one of the worst calamities of the year 2004. With a magnitude of 9.0, the undersea quake off the coast of Sumatra is the worst for 40 years and the fifth strongest since 1900.

In the Past:
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the highest death toll from a tsunami happened in 1896, when 27,000 people were drowned following an earthquake off the coast of Japan.
One of the most memorable disasters of recent times is Hurricane Mitch, which devastated much of Honduras and Nicaragua in Central America in 1998.
More than 10,000 people were estimated to have been killed and some two million left homeless as the torrential rain caused mudslides that swept away whole villages.
Bangladesh was even harder hit in 1970, when a cyclone killed up to 500,000 people. Winds of up to 230 km/h whipped up massive waves that took away entire villages.
China suffered similar losses when an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.3 almost obliterated the north-eastern city of Tangshan in 1976. The official number of people killed was put at around 250,000, although some said the figure was more like 750,000.
No borders
And almost exactly a year ago, a 6.3 quake devastated the Iranian city of Bam, killing more than 50,000.
China, and indeed Asia as a whole, has had its fair share of natural disasters over the centuries.
Whole communities are left devastated by natural disasters
Shanxi and Henan provinces lost more than 800,000 people when they were hit, in 1556, by one of the worst earthquakes in history.
In 1887, about 900,000 people died when the country's Yellow River burst its banks in the worst-ever recorded flooding.
A volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on Indonesia's Sumbawa island in 1815 claimed the lives of more than 90,000 people as a blanket of lava and ash covered all around it, leading to agricultural devastation, famine and disease.
And one of the worst monsoons in living memory claimed the lives of 10,000 people in Thailand over the course of three months in 1983. Some 100,000 people contracted waterborne diseases as a result of the storm.
Snow storms, forest fires and avalanches have all proved deadly. A single landslide in Peru in 1970 killed more than 18,000 people in the town of Yungay.
Most of these disasters were isolated to one area or one country. But, as the Asian tsunami has shown, nature knows no borders.
The droughts that swept across sub-Saharan African in the 1980s led to the starvation of an estimated one million people. They are threatening to do the same again. ( courtesy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4128509.stm

The loss is huge. But let us try our best to help the victims and the organizations involved in relief work.

Visit this link to donate:
http://www.ramdhanyk.com/movabletype/archives/thoughtprocess/001336.html

Fore more ways of donation:
http://www.ramdhanyk.com/movabletype/archives/thoughtprocess/001338.html

http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/