What if it happened here?

The 7.0 magnitude quake that has flattened the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, should give East Africans pause for thought. What if a similar quake hit here? How prepared are we? As it turns out, not very. And such an event is not as rare around these parts as some would like to think. According to Professor Chris Hartnady, a former Associate Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Cape Town, “Large areas of the African continent are in an unstable, tectonically active, state and, especially in the mountain regions, substantial danger is posed to growing populations.” Between 1980 and April 2002, the continent was hit by over 50 serious earthquakes, resulting in over 23,000 deaths and injuries.

Patrick Gathara lays it all out, and has some suggestions on how we can best protect ourselves-- without spending too much.

The tragedy of war

Imagine if you will, a procession of boys walking for months, even years on end. They retain only one goal in their hearts, to reach the safety of refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. Achak's journey begins in Marial Bai, a village in Southern Sudan and ends in his resettlement in Atlanta, Georgia with hundreds of other young Sudanese. The epic is in many ways tragic, however, Achak and others demonstrate the resolution of the human will to survive some of the most adverse conditions on the planet.

Read here as Nekessa Opoti writes a review on Dave Eggers' What is the What-- an autobiography of one of Sudan's Lost Boys.