Rain slowly drips through a gray tarpaulin strung up between two metal poles. During the day, searches for adequate shelter and food go unresolved. Electricity is impossible to find. Weather in May brings a spike in temperatures, in addition to the precipitation of the rainy season. Hurricanes creep into the minds of some, as summer draws nearer. Thirst is rampant, and there is not enough money to help find clean water to drink.

People walk down narrow pathways that were once streets, flanked on both sides by piles and piles of concrete, twisted steel and human bodies. The fear of disease is rampant, and only a lucky million or so have received vaccination from cholera, an intestinal illness transmitted through fecal-contaminated water. Nearly 25 percent of the people here have cholera, even though a cholera vaccine costs only $3.75.

This is the scene, today, in Haiti. Remember it? About 15 months ago an earthquake ravaged the area, killing over 300,000 people. Over 1 million people were left homeless, and about 3 million people were directly affected by the quake. Do you remember it?

You should. Too bad we don’t hear much about it anymore. However, people are still hungry, people are still thirsty, and people are still homeless. Nothing magical has happened in the past year. The Red Cross and other organizations assisting in the area are sure doing their best, though.

Towards the end of 2010, over 90 percent of the buildings that were destroyed in the quake are still sitting in various stated of disrepair. And, due to the unorganized state of the land tenure, it is difficult to identify who owns the damaged property. And, if they’re still alive.

Crime has steadily increased since the quake. Gang leaders take advantage of displaced individuals and families by ridding their makeshift homes of what little possessions are stored. Also, sexual abuse and rape of girls and women living in open-air, unsecure tents is frequent. Policing and enforcing the laws in place is a difficult endeavor for officials.

Oxfam recently released an official update of the relief efforts. It cited a lack of temporary housing, saying just 15 percent of those who suffered home-loss have been given temporary shelter. The minimal progress, I think, is an utter travesty.

Haiti will not rebuild without the help of core nations around the world. Those that have the means to help should still be doing whatever is in their power to accumulate assistance, via donations, first-hand help, and support. I urge you, reader, to do whatever you can to assist with the recovery in Haiti. The Red Cross website is a great place to designate where you want your donation, whether it’s $5 or $100.

Right now, the disasters in Japan and the southern part of the U.S. are garnering all the attention of the media, and, in turn, the donors. This summer, don’t forget about others with greater needs than yours. Remember Haiti; remember the destruction you witnessed on the TV over a year ago, because the situation has not improved. And it won’t, without the help of people like you.

Many of us college students don’t know what is going on outside of campus, let alone outside of the nation. But you would have to live under a rock to have not heard about the tragedy that befell Japan earlier this March.

On Mar. 11 at 9:46 pm, Japan time,  an earthquake struck Japan, hitting the northeastern part of the country with a staggering measurement of 8.6 on the Richter Scale. This earthquake was the largest in Japan history, and fifth largest in world history. But the earthquake was only the first of major disasters to hit this country. The earthquake created a huge tsunami that swept across the northeastern part of Japan. The death toll has been upwards of 8,450 with many still missing.

Throughout the rest of the night more than 25 aftershocks occurred, many over the 6.0 measure on the Richter Scale.

Tsunami warnings were sent out to Hawaii and much of the western coast of the United States around 9 am, central time.

This was only the start of the horrors, as the earthquake has shaken the foundations of several Japanese nuclear reactors in Fukushima Daiichi. These were shut down to prevent a meltdown but radiation has still leaked out causing contamination across the northern half of the nation.

President Barack Obama was quoted as saying,“The United States will continue to offer any assistance we can and we will stand with the people of Japan in the difficult days ahead.”

Today the nuclear crisis appears to be slowly stabilizing as crippled reactor cooling systems were able to be hooked up to power lines. Out of the six units three are operable with the rest soon to follow. With this helping the workers, the cores will be able to be cooled to prevent a meltdown.

“The fact that offsite power is close to being available for use by plant equipment is the first optimistic sign that things could be turning around,” Bill Borchardt, executive director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Operations told ABC news.

Although the people of Japan are not out of the woods yet. Contamination has been found in vegetation and water supplies which raised alarms across the country. The government has ordered a stop shipment from four regions around Fukushima.

“The crisis has still not been resolved and the situation at the plant remains very serious,” Mr. Amano, the head of the IAEA, told BBC News.

The U.S. has issued potassium iodide tablets to the U.S. government personnel and their families stationed in Japan. The government has also told several ships near the Japan coast to move further out to sea. Villagers around the power plants have been told not to drink the tap water for fear of higher levels of radiation.

The World Health Organization has found no evidence of further contamination in other countries around the area. Still countries such as China and Taiwan have vowed to check Japanese imports more carefully.

There is still a long way to go as 350,000 people are living in evacuation centers, and 900,000 households are without water.

However, there is some good to come of this disaster. Over 60 nations around the world have pledged their help to Japan, showing how many people are willing to aid a country in need. It is in these times of crisis where the true human nature of charity is shown.

Looking for heroes in Japan isn’t a difficult job these days. All it takes, it seems, is a natural disaster to bring out the best in people. But at the same time, disasters cause panic as well.

When the waves came crashing in from the ocean, Japanese citizens turned and ran, because a 9-foot wave of saltwater was overtaking literally everything in its path. I’m confident that you, dear reader, would do the same thing.

Running was the easy part for the Japanese people. Finding and seeing the aftermath was, and will be for many years, the hard part. It’s obvious in the videos all across the Internet; their faces show a pain unimaginable. I feel safe saying not many Loras students have experienced the same sort of tragedy they have. For the Japanese people, their dead are added to a list, and survivors are added to a much shorter list.

The Japanese people have proved to the world they aren’t weak. There are heroes to be found during this disaster — a disaster which some have said parallels the U.S. bombings during World War II. We in the U.S. are watching the whole disaster on our TV sets, in a comfy couch.

And Americans are still concerned about Charlie Sheen, which is mind-blowing to me.

I think America can learn a few lessons from this crisis, and from the Japanese people. And those lessons have nothing to do with nuclear energy …

Throughout the disaster, the Japanese people have needed a voice. But, indeed, maybe they have always had one. Yukio Edano is the chief government spokesman for Japan, and his face has been engrained into the Japanese citizens’ brains possibly more than anyone else’s.  He’s been at a podium addressing the Japanese people with a cool voice and a knowing blood-shot stare. Thing is, Edano reflects the appearance of many Japanese people during this difficult time. He’s visibly tired, unshaven and wearing a blue emergency jumpsuit. When he’s addressing the nation, he’s not a public figure wearing a suit and tie; he’s a Japanese citizen in a jumpsuit helping with rebuilding and cleanup, just like everyone else.

Obama and future presidents, take note: When there’s a disaster or public issue, we need you. We don’t like to admit it, but we do. And we don’t need you like we need money or a job, we need you like we need a pat on the back or a hug. We want to see you in a sweatshirt with dirt down the front. We want you to be one of us in a time of national crisis, like spokesman Edano. You don’t need to wear a tie to gain respect; sometimes simply getting your hands dirty like the rest of us is enough.

Dirty hands is a theme in Japan right now. We in America saw it when Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, or when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank. People come together in times of need. No hero is more important than the next; in a time of crisis, help can be found in all walks of life and places.

For instance, one must look no further than Ryo Taira, a local pet store owner who has devoted his post-tsunami time to rescuing stranded oceanic animals, brought in by the massive wave. Or consider the workers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. They’re risking their own lives to contain and repair the crippled plant. Radiation continues to escape the plant, but improvements have been made. For instance, the cooling systems used to store the nuclear material have been repaired. You’ve seen the employees; they’re the ones covered from head to toe in material designed to keep their skin from becoming radioactive. They are just a few of the unsung heroes in a situation that needs them.

The Japanese people are polite, they are unified and they are patriotic. It is such a shame that a natural disaster is what brings out these qualities for the world to see. I want the U.S. to really take into consideration the actions of the Japanese people. When we have disasters here, we place blame. In New Orleans, we blamed those who built the floodwalls. In the BP oil spill, we blamed BP. Blame does nothing. The Japanese aren’t pointing their fingers; they’re using them to rebuild their homes, their lives and their country.

When Fukushima Daiichi reactors  exploded after the earthquake of 9.0 magnitude and subsequent tsunami in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, fears over a nuclear ‘catastrophe’ spread like a wildfire.  The atrocious image of radiation began to haunt us as our news channels catered us their sensationalized reporting.

Rajendra Thakurathi | My Duhawk

But some of us have forgotten that we sometimes pay to get exposed to that radiation. BBC reports that you can pay about $1000 and get a whole-body CT scan as part of a medical check-up, but it can deliver you a dose equivalent to being 1.5 miles from the centre of the Hiroshima explosion; or even a flight exposes us to some level of radiation.

Yes, history has taught us that excessive level of radiation from nuclear disaster could be lethal. It may pose no immediate injuries but it is increasingly consequential with time. The Three Island Accident, the Chernobyl or the ghost of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still haunt the minds of the survivors.

In the Chernobyl disaster in Ukranian SSR in 1986, the reactor burst in a fiery ball while running at full capacity. The Chernobyl plant was, however, an entirely different design from the Japanese model. It did not have a containment vessel to hold the fuel inside, and the core of the reactor contained graphite. The graphite burned like coal and sustained a roaring fire for two weeks, pushing radioactive particles miles into the atmosphere. That is how some of Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout ended up in Northern Europe.

But Fukushima Daiichi has containment and the chain reaction at all the Fukushima reactors had ceased. The explosions that have occurred have mostly taken place outside the steel and concrete containment vessels enclosing the reactors.

The Three Mile Island incident in 1979 is still the biggest incident in the history of America where half of the reactor core in one unit melted due to the loss of coolant, though it resulted in no immediate injuries. However, the environmental impact (even in the case of Japan) could be unnoticeably deteriorating with time.

But let’s not forget the earthquake, tsunami and people affected by it. Let’s worry about the survivors who need immediate attention rather than the speculative turmoil of deadly radiation. The number of death from magnitude 9 quake and the tsunami has now risen to 6,405, with another 10,200 still missing. About 380,000 people are currently still in temporary shelters. The survivors have begun the recovery process as they mourn for the deaths, hunt for the missing, and pray for their loved ones. Let us stand in spirit with our Japanese friends as they live through this tragedy.

As for the radiation fear, “That, although striking and horrible, is something described as manageable,” said Kenneth Bergeron, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories.

Soothing sounds could be heard around the Visitation Complex this summer while squirrels hovered around the college. As for most of us, we were busy with our lives.

Music faculty adjunct Sandra Andersen and 15 students from the Loras Music Department responded to the voices requesting help for Haiti since the January 2010 earthquake with a music program called “Voices for Help.”

Andersen and her students performed various concerts, recitals and musicals at Gallagher Hall, located in the Viz and raised $1,900 from the audiences, including a generous donation from Makoqueta Valley Schools. Their project started in February and ended this July with the performance of the musical “Les Miserables.”

The donations will be used to fund service trips to Haiti.

The students involved in this program were seniors Whitney Arnold, Clare Horst, Drew Chapman, Tommy Castle, Patience Chiles, Kristi Olberding and Amy Kirkpatrick. Juniors involved were Luisa Jimenez, Katie Gees, Christie Gees, Alexa Tuescher, Rachel Weglarz and Cassie Koetz. Also involed was sophomore Daniel Thole, and first years Katie Koetz and Alex Castro.

Andersen and her students also have done various projects in the past. In 2007, they raised $5,000 for Heifer International, which takes livestock and training to impoverished areas, providing people with a sustainable food source.
Last year they held numerous recitals for the victims of flooding in Cedar Rapids, and worked with a school where in which half of the students and their families lost everything.

“Loras College is a very service-oriented college” explained Andersen. “We need to keep putting our prayers and concerns into action.We have our voices; we want to keep using our gifts to help others.”

Andersen is planning other future events, so keep your ears ready for some musicals coming your way.

by Sanjit Pradhananga

One of these days, they say, the Earth will shake like it hasn’t for 80 years, and I shudder to think of what will happen to fragile walls of Kathmandu valley. Sometimes, tumultuous midnights rouse me from nightmares of flicking on CNN one unsuspecting morning and seeing Anderson Cooper standing on the fallen facade of the Nepali heartbeat bemoaning the loss of streets that he never knew, parading corpses of people he never met.

We have always known the rickety sod that we lived on, haven’t we? I remember having the bejesus scared out of me in the sixth grade when Brother Jomon swore by the cross dangling from his collarino that the “big one” was due the next day. It never came, but that haunting anticipation is yet to fade. In our urban lull and political upheavals, we have often forgotten the horrors of the 1934 disaster when an earthquake 24 times stronger than the one that wrecked Haiti shook the Nepali foundations and liquefied the paved streets. Then there have been other ones, softer and transient, on quiet evenings when minor rumblings awoke us from our indifferent slumbers, knocking over glasses left carelessly on narrow window sills and reminding us of our mortality.

We cannot say we have not been warned.

Yet what do we do? Where do we start? How do we take this shantytown and convert it into a bustling metropolis without first bulldozing over these artifices of antiquity? How do we take diabolic scientific prophecies of the future and re-create our immeasurable past perched on this shaky land?

The other day, after a haunting episode during a night of rumbling thunders, I stood on a dejected sidewalk of a polished street, pining to see freckled puddles; those stagnant joys of my childhood with the beguiling blue heavens dancing in the filth. Should we start here? Those crater ridden streets, where, stumbling and falling, I learned to walk as a child. Dusty in the sun, muddy in the rain; utterly romantic in every shade of the sun. The little family-owned businesses in box-sized stores, pouring out glittering brass and copper pots out into the pavement. Hallucinogenic Shiva and Ganesh bedsheets, tie-dyed by an underpaid sweatshop tripster dangling from the windows. Those crumbling houses, built brick by brick, intricately carved window after window, by our forefathers, and handed down to us for upkeep but forgotten, then consumed by time, rain and termites, but the shaky foundations of which give root to who we essentially are as people. How do we restore that? Where do we relocate the city’s 4 million inhabitants to, with promises of having them return to redrawn neighborhoods and freshly painted streets? 

As children, we were told stories of how the Himalayas embodied the Nepali spirit. These gargantuan sentinels created by the Eurasian and Indo-Australian landmasses grinding against each other, have given us a sense of self-worth and importance. We were after all taught to be upstanding, unflinching and brave as these rocky giants in our backyard. Yet today, the very forces that created these artifices that define us, gathers, rumbling deep in the earth to consume and reclaim us once again. 

If a 7.0-magnitude earthquake like the one that rattled Port-au-Prince were to hit Kathmandu today, it is estimated that 85 percent of the building structures will be completely decimated. An 8.4-magnitude shake like the one in 1934 will leave nothing standing. We have watched with quickening pulses as earthquakes in Gujrat, Pakistan, Turkey, Sumatra, China, Haiti, Chile and now Tibet have ravaged everything in their wake. Kathmandu today is tabled as the city most vulnerable to earthquakes, with seismologists asking not if, but when, the next big one will come rattling our doors. 

Until then we wait, with muffled prayers and heavy hearts.

(Pradhananga is a recent Loras graduate from Nepal)

By Dr. John Eby

What can we say in the face of sudden disaster? How do we continue to believe in a good God who is not only cosmic and eternal, but also a God of history? Catastrophes such as the recent earthquake in Haiti — the greatest disaster in that nation’s exceedingly tragic past — certainly shake us to the core, and we quite naturally ask, “why?” That question seems especially poignant as I think of Forde.

Forde, the librarian at the Louverture Cleary School near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was one of the finest Christians I have ever met. His demeanor was so kind that you felt yourself a part of him. He was highly intelligent, and always ready to engage in a friendly but challenging discourse on theology or politics. Forde was one of the victims of the January earthquake; he was trapped alive in rubble for 24 hours, but died while rescuers worked to dig him out.

Forde’s personal integrity and strong sense of morality were exemplary: one day a few years ago, for instance, while we were mixing concrete for a basketball court in the playground being built by the parent organization of the school, the Haitian Project , we ran out of sand at a critical moment. Without the sand, we could not proceed and our time was impossibly short. There was a pile of sand on the vacant property next door where the people in the neighborhood burned their garbage and the kids played soccer. The sand had sat unused for years (it was there long before I started going to Haiti). No one knew whose it was or who even owned the property on which it sat … if anyone owned the property at all. The Americans in charge of the building project decided to use the sand and replace it with a new shipment later that same day, a solution that was not ideal but seemed the only practical solution, and was certainly harmless. As we started to load the wheelbarrows, though, Forde shouted from a distance for us to stop. The project directors explained to him that we needed the sand, it seemed to belong to no one, and that it would be replaced that day with better sand. Forde listened and then said, “No. It isn’t ours. That is not the way we do things at Louverture Cleary.” So we left the pile, ordered sand, waited, and still got the project done on time.

Forde’s integrity, intelligence and his deep Christian faith were an inspiration to me and his colleagues at the school, as well as to the students. We will all miss his gentle heart, his kind attentiveness and his energetic, sophisticated conversations. He leaves a wife and 3-year-old son, a family he adored and was proud to support on his small income.

Forde was an exceptional human being by any measure. But he is only one of tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, whose lives have been cut short by this incredible tragedy. The death and casualty toll from the collapsing buildings is only the beginning: the destruction of hospitals means inadequate care for many who are injured; the loss of homes means people living in conditions even more squalid than before; many of the 20 percent of people who had work before the quake no longer have a business to return to; disease, starvation and thirst are increasing the suffering in that land. I have heard many disaster relief experts say that this is the worst they have ever seen.

Calamity always hits the poor the hardest. These Haitians, who even before the quake struggled daily to find enough food to keep them alive and who were forced to drink water that gives many unending headaches, who faced mudslides and vicious hurricanes, as well as a long history of political instability; these Haitians did not choose to be born on top of a fault-line buried beneath the surface of the earth. They are just there, and we are here.

If God intervenes miraculously in this world, why did he let this happen to these poor people? Is this a sign that God in fact doesn’t work in history? These are tough questions but good ones, and I don’t think there is only one way to answer them. I do believe, though, that it is possible to search for God in all of this mess. I don’t think God causes earthquakes, and He certainly does not do so in order to punish poor people, for whom the Scriptures announce special divine affection.

Forde and the many other wonderful people in the area – most Christians, but some not – did not deserve this. The earth moves and shifts in its own timing, almost as if waking up to stretch a bit. While the quake is beyond our control, the disaster is a human disaster – the result of a multitude of man-made problems for which blame can be distributed liberally to Haitian leadership and social ills, but equally to the racism, colonialism, and greed of countries such as France, Spain, Britain, and the United States. Such a quake would have been far less traumatic in San Francisco. It makes less sense to me to blame this catastrophe on God than to see its roots in human history.

I have great confidence that God works actively for human redemption; that He strives to rescue us from ourselves and help us to find Him in and through each other. I hope and pray that this is a moment of growth for all of us, in which we come to find more clearly that divine spark of love and compassion that roots us so deeply to the rest of humanity. I hope and pray that we all know this not only through the gift of empathy, but that this spark of love drives us to action for the sake of others.

I know many Haitians, and I know that a number of them will through some miracle and their incredible strength of spirit maintain a sense of hope despite what has happened. But I know that hope will be nearly impossible for many of them. This is why our role here in the U.S. is so important. As an acquaintance of mine who has family living in horrible conditions in Gaza said recently, “I have to be the hope for them, because they have none. I have to be the hope.” When those in despair cannot find any foundation for hope, we must take that on ourselves, living by faith that God will bring forth a new and beautiful creation out of chaos. I must act on that faith by knowing that I am one of the instruments he will play in that renovation. And not only I, but all of us – U.S. citizens and Haitians alike – are God’s voices to each other for our mutual and communal renewal. May we be their hope, and may they become ours.

God is, I believe, very active in history; but He’s not a tyrant. Instead, He is a problem-solver, constantly responding to our human fallibility with the patience of a parent determined to persuade us toward greater virtue and with the creativity of an Eternal Being for whom creation and re-creation is an unending act of love.