Earthquakes on my mind

The earthquake in New Zealand reminds me of how, not a day goes by when I don't think about earthquakes. I grew up on the East coast, and never really knew anything about them, until I came to college in California and settled here. Even then, it was a few years before I would experience one.

It was 1971, and I had a baby and a toddler, when early one morning we were awakened by the shaking, grabbed both children and ran outside. We were in Altadena, and we could see the flashes of light as transformers all over the Valley were exploding, and we stood shakily watching and feeling the earth receding and moving as we stood there. Finally, we took the children inside. Several kitchen cabinets had spilled out their contents. From that day forward, I always close cabinets tightly, even thought that aspect hasn't happened again.

The next earthquake happened at around 7:45 AM as we were about to leave for school, in 1987. This one struck like a hammer - in fact, we thought maybe a truck had hit the house, but then the earth rumbled once again. My son had been upstairs, and he lurched down the stairs as I huddled under the doorjamb in the kitchen. Both of us ran outside, and saw that the field stone chimney on our roof had partially collapsed, and the loud sounds we had heard had been those stones bouncing down the roof and into the yard. It turned out that 100 chimneys in our Pasadena neighborhood, near the Arroyo, had fallen in this quake. Most of these houses had been built in the 1900 to 1920 craftsman building period. Our house had been built in 1908. We were only the third owner. It was the original chimney, and it was repaired and the roof was replaced.

The next earthquake I experienced happened around 7:30 AM, and I had just come in from my swimming workout at Caltech, in June of 1991. There were around ten of us in a large shower room, and we were naked. When the building started to shake, no one knew whether to run outside naked or to grab clothes or whatever. But it was a quick shake, and did not seem to cause any damage, but it did give us all a scare. I think one is more vulnerable when naked.

In 1994, there was another bad earthquake, centered in Northridge. I remember that one for two major reasons. We didn't feel it as much in Pasadena, but a concrete wall fell and killed a student walking by at Cal State Los Angeles. One of my students, at Pasadena City College, was in an apartment building in Northridge that collapsed early that morning and killed several people on the first floor, including her sister. You just never forget experiences like this.

So, maybe it isn't surprising that every day, I think about earthquakes. Some of the ways that the memory of earthquakes affects me are:  every time I close a kitchen cabinet door and every time I drive under a freeway overpass; every time I walk from the swimming pool to my car at UC Irvine, along a building with large concrete overhangs. The possibility of an earthquake affects my daily life, but really, I don't let this get in the way of all the things that I do. I just think about it.

YES WE CAN!

I can't help it. When Obama was elected, the world reaction was amazing - all over the world, people celebrated. I said it then to all my students, and I say it again today as I watch what is happening in Egypt: the world of instant media, internet reactions, is changing the world.
Do you remember those videos of world reactions to Obama's victory? Do you remember crowds everywhere, in English, singing out "YES WE CAN"? And so, that is what these crowds celebrating remind me, they remind me that anything is possible.

Some older people lament that the world is changing, things will never be the same for their children and grandchildren, but I don't say that. I say, this is their world, and they will shape it, and they are doing it! It is not that having Obama means a lot of change. Change takes baby steps in democracies, it takes time. But change is happening, that is for certain, and that's what this Egyptian revolution shows. The Egyptian people won't get all the changes they want, but they have learned the power of standing together, peacefully.

Here's two links showing what I mean:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMHpib5ZNCc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

Enjoy.

 

 

OTS #3 - Egypt, beyond the Suez Canal

OK, so how much do you know about Egypt? The Pyramids? The Suez Canal? 44 years ago, I started teaching at a 6 year junior high/high school, in Ardsley-on-Hudson, NY. I had to teach a ninth grade social studies course, called "Non-Western World", or at least that's what I remember it was called. I had majored in American Studies for my B.A., with a double major in History and English, and my M.A. was in Chinese History - guess that qualified me to teach this course!

In other words, I knew next to nothing about the Middle East, Egypt, and Africa, sub-Saharan or otherwise. I did know a little bit about India, having taken a year long course about Modern India, and a handful of courses about non-Chinese Asian history, too. How would I teach about Africa? How would I handle Egypt? The books I was provided for in the course were really elementary. This was before the internet - as my students of today always say, "what do you mean, before the internet?" as if no one could possibly be that old! How was I going to supplement the materials and help the students if I didn't have any background?

In hindsight, my solution was pretty cool - for those of you who don't live in NYC - or even for those of you who do. I did live in NYC, and I opened the phone book, and found out where all the Consulates of some of these nations were, and preceded by a call, I went to gather materials. Just think! There was no security in those days. I was in my early 20s, and pretty naive. Of course, I realized these materials might be very biased, but really, you should have seen the maps and posters I was able to get, all for free. I spent afternoons and Saturdays traveling to these consulates for the first month of my teaching, and then planned around the materials.

The greatest "gift" for my teaching came from the Egyptian Consulate. Mostly, they gave me beautiful travel posters. But they also provided a map of the Middle East that did not include Israel at all. What a fantastic teaching opportunity, as I put their map and the classroom map of the Middle East side by side on the wall and had the students figure out how and why the maps were different. I like to think that they learned a lot from that exercise, but who knows.

I don't know what else my students learned about Egypt that year, but they did learn about how who is telling the story makes a huge difference. This experience came back to me this week, watching  Egypt experience such unprecedented upheaval. Will we learn more about Egypt, beyond the Pyramids, beyond the Suez Canal, more about what the real "back story" might be? I feel like I am watching the "shifting sands" of a desert as I watch newscasters and others trying to explain what is going on. Maybe if we all knew more about Egypt, we would understand more about what's happening, and who is telling the story - beyond the Suez Canal.