Asian Disaster

First of all, so that you know, I am spending my holidays with my uncle and his family in Norway. I was expecting to see more articles about the terrible disaster in southeast Asia in Iranian web logs but nothing has been written in important Iranian web logs as far as I know! And that is a real pity. Exactly it was these days last year when our country experienced a similar tragedy and everybody around the world gathered to help and now it could be our turn to return part of that help. Always when you think nothing can be worse reality shows itself and reminds you that it can. I still can't imagine this. I am now in Norway and there are a few things to say in here. First, today I saw the Norway TV channel NRK's reporter in TV. He was the one who interviewed me in Bam last year and now he is in Sri Lanka and just as last year he is going to miss his son's birthday and new year's eve! He is admirable, I think. Second thing is that today my uncle received an SMS from one of his friend telling that she is alright and she is now trying to leave Thailand! It is amazing that when a friend of yours or one you know is inside a disaster, it becomes more real and sensible to you. And lastly and most importantly is knowing the fact that a country like Norway which claims that it defends humanity everywhere, helps 1 billion Norwegian Kron to war in Iraq but only few millions of Kron to countries damaged in earthquake and Tsunami, isn't this ironic?

Bam, one year later

Today is the first anniversary of the terrible tragedy in Bam. Last year, two days after the earthquake I managed to go to Bam and now I want to tell some of the things I saw without getting too sentimental! But I don't think !i can do this without getting emotionally involved with the disaster. The news was short and quick! An earthquake has occurred and the scale of it is yet unknown. It was probably the once in a life time chance to help others who needed help in this scale and when I found out that there was a rare opportunity to use this chance I had no doubt that I would do it and so were more than 100 other students who probably had thought the same thought! We left Tehran without knowing whether we could get there or not and whether we could be of any help. We had absolutely no idea about what we were going to face. So we were trying to consider the worst case but the problem was that we didn't even know what the worst case was. We got on the bus and we got there two days after the earthquake and the night before me and one other student went to several drugstores in Tehran and bought whatever we thought would be helpful whether to us or to the people of Bam. In the early morning of the first day they divided us into several groups, about ten groups of search and rescue and only one group which had to do the worst and hardest part: bury the dead. Working in this last group was voluntary but we were warned that it would require doing very horrible things and amazingly I found myself going with this group to Bam's cemetery which had grown to 10 times of its size before the earthquake just in two days.

Internet

Now, I am on an airplane going to Norway to spend the Christmas holidays with my uncle and his family.
This morning before going to the French class and before leaving Toulouse, I found a link to Hoder's interview with VOA. Of 1:30 program I watched almost an hour of it, and then I had to go to class, in the way to the class, I told to my friend Behzad about this. The interesting fact that hit me in this interview was the very low and near zero knowledge of average people of Internet! Even in USA itself, but of course this is more severe in Iran. And we are talking about the great impact Internet has made in Iranian community! Considering it from statistical point of view, we can say that it is nothing compared to the whole nation. Internet is a very new concept and it is the same everywhere, but as others are making progress in developing its own culture and obliging everyone to have at least an e-mail, our university professors are having hotmail and yahoo emails and sometimes it is very shameful! I will write more on this.

Upcomings!

About two weeks after the Persian gulf fever I wrote an article about Iranian anti-Arab racism and posted it in my Persian blog but unfortunately I haven't got time to write a similar article about the same subject in English. Now that I'm going to stay in my uncle's for two weeks probably I will have plenty of time to write this and also about the Bam earthquake one year after the tragedy and write what I saw and tell my experience about it.