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| NEW INTERNATIONALIST 222 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| THIS MONTH'S THEME | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Responding
to Third World disasters Disasters
- a satirical view Infotainment The
wind, the wave and the forgotten
Disaster
strikes! Thank you
Mr President Of dignity
and dying The myth
of compassion fatigue
Beat
the quake, man My daddy's
dead Simply. the causes of African famine
Thunderbirds
are no-go! |
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DISASTERS |
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| FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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We see our job as a different one: filling in the gaps in the news, setting it in a context that includes the Third World and generally asking questions that news journalists are not encouraged or able to ask. Often that allows us to depart completely from anything resembling a news agenda: to offer, for example, a travelogue in Vietnam or a delve into the secrets of biotechnology at a time when the rest of the world was concentrating exclusively on the Gulf War. But there are times when we too have to tear up our own rules and respond to the news - and this issue is an attempt to do that. I had spent a good while researching another subject entirely when the succession of disasters in the Third World became too much for me. Hearing about the desperate plight of the Bangladeshis and the Ethiopians was bad enough - but hearing people start to talk about 'compassion fatigue' as their main response was even worse. I suddenly realized not only that the NI had a job to do - exploring why such disasters happen and what can be done about them - but also that there was still just about time for me to abandon my other project and do it myself. Little did I realize when I got caught in a typhoon in Vietnam last year and wrote about the people affected by it that I would be returning to the subject so soon. But researching this issue has at least helped me resolve one question that arose in my mind as the wind whipped up the waters in Hué: what's the difference between a typhoon, a cyclone and a hurricane? There are some technical differences but they are broadly the same kind of violent storm rotating around a low pressure centre ('the eye'). The main distinction is usually one of geographical location: hurricanes are generally in the Americas, particularly the Caribbean, where Spanish colonizers adapted a word from the now-extinct Taino Indian language, hurakán; cyclones can happen anywhere but you will hear the word cropping up most in relation to storms in the Indian Ocean; and typhoon is simply the word for a cyclone in the China seas - the Chinese for 'big wind' is tai fung, though the Greek tuphon ('whirlwind') probably contributed too. No time for such technicalities in what follows. As longer-serving NI readers go through these pages they might summon up just a smidgeon of nostalgia, since this is the last issue to appear in this design: next month we unveil a whole new look which we are confident will make the magazine (even?) more of a pleasure to read. |
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Chris Brazier
for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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Letters COVER PHOTO: Taken on Kutubia Island, one
of those worst affected by the recent cyclone in Bangladesh, by Pablo Bartholomew
of the Gamma agency. |
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We've
mentioned in this space before that the NI does not attempt to be a
news magazine. This is fortunate since we would pretty soon be out of business
if we tried to be one - how could a small, independent organization like ours
compete with the vast resources and instant access of the TV news networks
or the quality press? 
