Word: disasterous
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Deborah Rodriguez left two sons and a failed marriage behind in Holland, Michigan, when she headed to war-shattered Afghanistan in 2002 with a few weeks of disaster-relief training and a suitcase full of moist towelettes. "I imagined I would spend the month there bandaging wounds, splinting broken limbs...
Rodriguez was a disaster at disaster relief, but she brought along some tools that proved providential. "I never travel without my scissors," she says in The Kabul Beauty School, her amusing, inspiring account of good intentions gone platinum, with streaks. Rodriguez had worked as a beautician in Michigan, and when...
Tornadoes are among the least predictable storms. It was a lifesaving triumph that forecasters were able to alert the people of Greensburg 20 minutes before the monster struck. But the sad spectacle of finger pointing and recriminations in the aftermath of disaster is becoming as predictable as the stoicism of...
We spend our lives "engaged in small talk, focusing on the known," while Black Swans-- dramatic, unpredictable events--shape the course of history, says mathematical investor turned philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Sept. 11, World War I and the Wall Street crash of 1987 are all demonstrations that "the world is...
"It's not primarily to ... do with finger-pointing and what every country should be doing," she said. "This is helping the secretary-general influence and move the political process forward. ... The question is how do we move to avoid disaster."