I am an expat from Bangladesh originally, and it's struck me that the name of my country has already come up in several blog posts & news reports. It's usually in a disparaging sense as in: "You expect to see things like this in Haiti or Bangladesh ARRGHH!"
It's true that
our location in the heart of a river delta makes us prone to annual flooding, some years tolerable, some years terrible, 1988 and 1998 being particularly bad years in recent memory. (I remember when school was out for a whole month in the fall of 1988, and when we went back we could see the watermark on the school walls were about 10 feet high). And yes, the regularity of disasters lends an extra dose of preparedness and alertness to the relief efforts, there is even a separate Ministry (or Department, in US terms) for the job.
However, I can tell all the good readers and blog posters and US commentators out there that if some of the scenes that have been reported in New Orleans - especially things like looting and lawlessness, or even worse, dead people lying in the open - if all this had happened in Bangladesh, there would have been scandal and outrage, and a call for action and accountability at the highest levels.
My thoughts go out to all the people of New Orleans, especially those left behind in this apocalyptic nightmare scenario. I don't know if their city will ever recover (and it's a shame, it's a city I never got around to visiting although I lived in Texas for several years). But I hope that their immediate needs are taken care of, either by government or the private sector relief agencies.