Facing disasters
The tidal wave that drowned at least 1,600 people in Papua, New Guinea, has local residents wondering what they did to cause such a disaster. They talk darkly of how teenagers decapitated a statue of the Virgin Mary just one day before the event occurred. Another version is that a few days before the wave evil witch doctors performed a black magic ceremony.
This sort of cause and effect thinking might seen naive but it wasn’t so long ago we North Americans subscribed to beliefs just as strange. In our house we had an antique medical book that claimed all illness was due to sin. Certain types of transgressions resulted in scarlet fever or dyspepsia.
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My uncle suffered from poliomyelitis as a child. His folks, then living in rural Minnesota, treated his affliction by feeding him fried chicken on a night of a full moon. The chicken was tasty but my uncle spent the rest of his life with one leg shorter than the other.
The Papuans have been urged to permanently abandon the sea level village sites that were engulfed by the huge tidal wave, but locals say they will return.
The betting is that within six months eels, crocodiles and other scavengers will have cleaned up the human and animal dead and surviving villagers will be back fishing for crayfish and lobsters and hunting for ducks and wild pigs.
Nature has amazing recovery powers. The forest fires that swept the Salmon Arm area subsided and within days green shoots of new plants appeared.
It makes one wonder if some disaster wiped out key people like you and me, would the world come crashing to a halt?
