Sheila's LiveJournal

I'm beginning to think that I'm some kind of jinx, bringing down disaster on the places around the world I've recently visited. I won't count Rwanda, because their troubles had all happened before I got there. But how do you explain Kenya – that relatively democratic, reasonably well-governed nation – erupting in civil unrest just a few weeks after I visited? And how about Tibet? Certainly, I was there over a year before the normally peaceful monks started rebelling and people were getting themselves manhandled or worse on the streets of Lhasa.

And now we have Sichuan Province in trouble.

Nitpickers and other detail-oriented folk will no doubt point out that two of the previously mentioned disasters were man-made, but that an earthquake is An Act of God (or Mother Nature, if you prefer). But we can't dismiss the fact that I was there in Sichuan. And – worse news for all you Nature Conservancy folk, or members of the WWF or PETA – I visited the Wolong Panda Reserve while I was in Chengdu. (Luckily, reports say the pandas are okay, all eighty adults and assorted cubs, along with their human staff, just a trifle shaken up.)

Coincidence? I don't think so!