See these clouds? You may find them very nice and colourful (i find them colourful too) but these clouds were on the sky above Sichuan before the earthquake strikes.

I’ve been reading the newspapers lately, about the earthquake in China, Sichuan. I have to admit that I don’t really read the newspapers, except for the interesting ones, and I don’t really follow news of disasters in the past (even though i’m supposed to, as i studied pure geog). But the other day, as I was watching the television, I saw the news of the Sichuan earthquake and started following the news on the earthquake.

It was measured 7.9 on the richter scale and it happened in the afternoon, 2.28pm, when the children were in school. More than 25 thousands of lives (still increasing) were lost, more than 200 thousands of people were injured and schools, homes (about 240 thousands of people are homeless), roads and bridges were destroyed. Parents had lost their only child (one child policy in China, remember?). Some parts of Sichuan lost their connections to the outside world and the rescue team could not contact them and they had to walk into the affected areas to bring them commodities as roads were destroyed.

Building collapses

Rescue team

We, Singaporeans, always take things for granted, such as food and water. Imagine if an earthquake were to strike in Singapore, supplies of food and water would be cut off, HDB buildings might collapse (my friend say they wouldn’t topple but titanic did sink, didn’t she?), most of us would be dead. I might be hiding under a table or chair, hoping that none of the heavy walls is going to fall on me, hoping that i can just die immediately without any pain.

What we can do is to count our blessings to live in Singapore, where all our neighbouring countries are protecting us from the natural disaster that had been happening in the past few years.

p.s: pictures taken from google.com