Grieving for the people of Kelantan ....... The only thing good about Boxing Day yesterday was that it was our 45th Wedding Anniversary. Other than that, several monuemental tragedies have happened on Boxing day. We were in Mecca doing the Haj on Boxing day of 2004 when the news arrived that Acheh had been flattened by that terrible Tsunami. The eventual death toll caused by that tragedy was probably more than a quarter million. There were a lot of broken people in Mecca in 2004 after that. Almost everyone from Acheh performing their Haj would have lost somebody back home ... where there were no homes anymore. We and them were devastated. And now on this Boxing Day, the floods in Kelantan is causing so much misery .... while Nero is playing his fiddle in Hawaii. The floods in Kelantan come year after year but our impotent powers that be are either unconcerned or incompetent to do something about it. In my simplistic mind, perhaps a solution could be to dredge the Kelantan river mouth, and concurrently improve the drainage system, so that flood waters could move much quicker to the sea. But theres probably a better solution if only we can throw money at the problem, instead of the well connected getting rich from overpriced contracts. For example,theres a huge storm drain in LA I believe, which is helping LA not get inundated by flash floods. Perhaps our PM should fly somewhere where he could see how people tackle these tragedies instead of golfing in Hawaii? I remember a piece I wrote about the great Earthquake on Boxing day of 2003 which flattened Bam in South Iran where 80,000 people died. As I grieve for the people of Kelantan I remember that great tragedy in Bam in Iran,where I have several photos of a Before and After the great earthquake. I shot the first photo of the 2000 year old Citadel of Bam in 2001 during my first drive from Istanbul through the Old Silk Road of Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, The Northwest Frontier, the Karakoram Highway, the Khunjerab Pass into the Taklimakan Desert of Xinjiang Uyghur, China, Laos, Thailand and back to Malaysia. I drove through Bam again in 2007, on another one of my adventures driving from London to Malaysia. I knew work was going on to rebuild Bam and I wanted to see how much has been done. The second photo was the devastated Bam. You can read the original piece I wrote by clicking here digitalartist.my/?q=node/730
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 13:47:27 +0000
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