I wanted to ammend that last post with a follow up on the storm. Although in Can Tho we were relatively unaffected. . .I have heard that a couple of trees were toppled, about a hundred miles away nearly a hundred people died and the storm destroyed tens of thousands of houses. Two things occurred to me.

1.) There seems to be no sort of adequate warning system in place to deal with these storms. Nobody had any idea where this thing was going to hit or how strong it was going to be and there was absolutely no call for evacuation. If it had been a little more powerful, there would have been thousands of deaths instead of a hundred.

2.) The people who's lives were affected by this storm are exactly the people who cannot afford to deal with the clean up. A family who loses their tin roof is a family who often must rebuild with banana leaves and the next time a storm comes through they must do it again. The families who can afford a solid house lost nothing. Its the ones who have these little thatch houses who have lost everything. A friend of mine described his trip back to one of the most affected areas: "everything was destroyed, every house was damaged except for the few concrete houses. . .there was a woman sitting in a pile of rubish that used to be her home. Personal belongings were scattered across the yard and her children were running around. Nobody bothered to pick anything up, but it wasn't for lack of pride, laziness, or even depression, but where was she going to put it. What do you do with your belongings when you don't even have a shelf to store them on or a room to put them in?"

And I never would have known that anyone was affected only a hundred miles away.