The Victims' Plight

One catastrophe after another visited on the vulnerable of the world. Weather systems gone truly awry. Violent windstorms, severely unprecedented flooding, cataclysmic earth tremors, sweeping tsunamis, unrelenting rains, severely debilitating heat waves, and sometimes combinations of these events of nature.

No sooner, it seems, does the world hear of one country reeling under the onslaught of a severe weather event ascribed to global warming, climate change, and just sheer unadulterated misfortune of geography, than another erupts and we hear about, read about countless victims.

Now, 31 million people across South Asia have been hit with the heaviest flooding experienced in the region in decades.

Thousands have died, drowned in the eddying flood waters. In India's northern Bihar state countless desperate people are marooned on the roofs of their houses, hoping to receive emergency supplies, dropped by helicopter. The emergency packages sometimes missing their targets and sinking into the murky floodwaters.

Over six thousand villages have been submerged in the floodwaters. In several districts rainfall has been 250 to 300 percent higher than the average for the last thirty years. India is blaming hard-flood-hit Nepal and Nepal claims overflowing Indian border dams have flooded the country's low-lying regions.

Nature remains mute in this human dispute, although she's the cause of it.

And here we are in Canada, enjoying a lovely month of August in the summer of 2007. The headlines in Canada's national newspapers trumpet: "Canada to give $1M in relief"! Won't that be a great big help, considering the overwhelming size of the catastrophe?

Canada's foreign affairs minister grandly proclaims "Canada stands with these countries as they carry out their relief efforts."

A whopping $1M in relief funds.