In the deluge of reporting surrounding Hurricane Katrina, I got stuck on a rather quirky piece – about bread, and how it has highlighted the stark contrasts between two nations struck by the same tragedy.
"In New Orleans there was shooting and looting when the floods came last week. When a similar inundation struck India's financial capital Mumbai in month earlier, there was no violence, just free wada-pav bread," read the report.
And as a person who's always held ideals such as unity over division and cultivation over destruction – when it comes to the human race – close to my heart, and who considers her true calling to be to feed and uplift the poor, this moved me deeply.
Indian street vendors reportedly passed out the 'wada-pav', a potato-filled bread, to their fellow citizens wading through waist-high water. This brought residents of Mumbai – with a population count of 20 million – closer. A people who's humaneness has been carved, no doubt, from having dealt with calamity through the ages.
One relief worker who worked in Mumbai believes law and order in New Orleans broke down because "people are not used to facing calamities. They expect complete efficiency and find it difficult to cope if it does not come about."
This is a valid point, though I suspect it could be more than that. Perhaps the fact that the US government had responded sooner to the tsunami disaster in December 2004 than to a disaster in their own backyard Waiting for help for five days in a sinking city does have the power to make one feel surreal, like you're on the set of Waterworld, and that rules of the game have changed. Really now, who could be bothered with rules at that stage?
But abiding by the rules – no matter how vague they might seem – and practising common decency – regardless of how bizarre the circumstances – are apparently exactly what are need when things go wrong, large scale or not. Like helping your neighbour and sharing your food if you have any to spare.
It might sound irrelevant now, but if scientists are right, Katrina will not be a unique event, which means we'll have to make sure we brush up on our sense of humanity and humaneness in the event of more devastating natural tragic occurrences. And they're coming, say scientists.
Experts measuring ocean temperatures and trade winds – the two big factors that breed these storms in the Caribbean and tropical North Atlantic, say global warming appears to be pumping up the power of big Atlantic storms, putting 2005 on track to be the worst-ever year for hurricanes.
Right here at home, David Lindly, manager of the Mondi Wetlands Project (a programme of the Wildlife and Environment Society of SA and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, specialising in the wise use and rehabilitation of wetlands) has said that in many parts of South Africa, floodwaters have the potential to build up to monstrous proportions and wreak havoc, as they often had nowhere safe to flow to.
He warned that South Africa had seen similar environmental degradation to what had contributed to the destruction of New Orleans, and singled out wetlands in Mpumalanga and coastal forests in KwaZulu-Natal being tilled for agriculture, and overgrazing in Limpopo as activities that would contribute to such uncontrolled flooding.
To prevent this from happening, said Lindly, we should take care of our grasslands and wetlands; he calls these nature's safety valves. "Rivers do not occur in isolation but are part of intricate wetland systems consisting of grassland 'sponges' in catchment areas, marshes, reedbeds, floodplains and river banks," said Lindly.
Scientifically, the odds are slim that Katrina will be a unique event: 22 tropical storms during the six-month June-November season have been predicted; seven of these storms are likely to strike the US. But let one thing about Katrina remain unique may it remain the only event during which the human factor was so sadly neglected.
