Author: Josh Philip Ross

As we all know by now, the ferocious tsunami that struck Asia and Africa on 26 December is one of the most devastating natural disasters in history. The United Nations, of course, is playing a major role in coordinating the relief efforts.

The disaster struck a number of places Jenny and I traveled in India, including Chennai (Madras), Mahabalipuram, and the former French colony of Pondicherry. (On our living room wall is a Pondy silk scarf, and in our cabinet of curiosities is a statue of the goddess Laxmi from Mahabalipuram.) This brings home the tragedy to me personally, both because I’ve met and interacted with the locals and seen the places that are now devastated, and because the tourists who were hurt and killed were people just like me and the people I socialized with.

Austin’s Blog has a collection of videos of the tsunami, which are not for the faint of heart.

And finally, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece a couple of days ago discussing previous tsunamis and similar natural disasters, and warning that the island of La Palma, in the Canaries, will one of these days collapse into the sea, launching a tsunami that will hit the east coast of the United States with a wall of water taller than any skyscraper. We would have eight hours or so to evacuate, and we’d need to get pretty far inland to be safe.

I suppose this is all a reminder that nature is very big, we are very small, our lives are very short, and the only thing we can be sure of is that we will eventually die. So enjoy the present moment, because it’s all there is.

Happy new year.

If you’re feeling as awful about the big tsunami as everyone else, you might want to donate to the Red Cross, which is coordinating disaster relief. The website is running slowly — hopefully because it’s swamped with people making donations — but if you wait, it should load.

It being Christmas Eve Eve (and the last workday before Christmas), I decided to take my stash of leftover Pepero and Choco-Pies to work and hand them around to the admins. The non-Koreans were a little confused, but pleased enough. Cheryl, who works in the glass reception booth downstairs, said, “You must have heard my stomach growling,” and Bing, after insisting that she didn’t need any gifts, immediately gave in at the sight of a Choco-Pie.

But the Koreans were thrilled, giving guilty giggles at the thrill of eating what are obviously kid foods, on a par with Fruit Rollups or Twinkies. Ambassador Shin caught me handing them out and asked, “How do you know Pepero?”

“I lived in Korea,” I explained. “I remember Pepero Day.” He grinned and walked away.

Merry Christmas!

Check out this fascinating front-page article in the Times about the Japanese fever for “Yon-sama,” a Korean actor in a Korean soap opera called Winter Sonata, and the enormous cultural impact that it’s having.

Having decided that I need to get a better grounding in the history of East and Central Asia’s major players, I just bought China: A New History, by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman; A History of Japan, by R. H. P. Mason and J.G. Caiger; and Russia and the Russians: A History, by Geoffrey Hosking. My plan is to read about a given era in China and Japan, then read about it in Ki-Baik Lee’s A New History of Korea, thus getting an overall sense of East Asian history and a clearer understanding of what outside events Korean history is developing against. (The Russian history I can tackle later.)

For much of the year, the UN is out of session, so I don’t really have any speechwriting duties. I have a great deal of free time that I can spend however I want — writing a novel, say, or blogging — and I try to devote at least a portion of that time to doing research in relevant areas. Right now, for example, I’m reading Ki-baik Lee’s A New History of Korea. At other times, I’ve put some effort into learning a little Korean, read books on the UN, read through the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, read a bunch of speeches on Security Council reform.

But I do have more immediate duties. Sometimes the tasks have a political flavor, like looking up books on Afghanistan for Ambassador Chun (though these were to send to his son, who’s stationed there). Often, though, my role is just to help the Mission officers to negotiate the confusions of American life. Yesterday, for example, Young and I went through an auto insurance form for one of the officers. Or the other day, one of the officers called me into his office to ask me about breaking his lease in New Jersey and was very reassured when I told him that the worst they could possibly do to him was sue him for the two months’ rent he was getting out of — and that was an unlikely possibility, considering that he’s leaving his apartment to go to Iraq.

And then there are the diplomatic confusions, as when one of the ambassadors had to respond to a Christmas card but wasn’t sure who it was from. His secretary came into our office wielding a card with stripes of black, yellow and red across one corner; a complicated coat of arms involving a bird, a gazelle-looking thing and an African shield with a drum on it; and an inscrutable signature, followed by “DPR.” Looking at our trusty world map with all the flags on it, we worked out that the only countries with the right colors on their flags, in the right order, were Belgium and Uganda, and I couldn’t believe Belgium would have African stuff on its coat of arms (or its Christmas card), considering its unsavory history there. Then I Googled “Uganda coat of arms” and found that indeed, the card was from Uganda. Next came figuring out who the DPR (deputy permanent representative) was. This time Young worked it out, referring to our “Blue Book” of all the UN missions and their senior staffs.

So this is what I do when I’m not writing speeches.

A friend of mine recently decribed the oil-for-food scandal as feeling to him a bit like Whitewater in the early days: the sheer volume of accusations makes it feel like there must be something going on, but it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on just who is accused of what sort of wrongdoing.

Now Slate provides a helpful guide to who did what. Note the conclusion:

The program did save lives: Average daily calorie intake nearly doubled in Iraq from 1996 to 2002. And Saddam never reconstituted the nuclear weapons program that was the ostensible reason for last year’s invasion. The greatest tragedy of the oil-for-food program may be that, for all its Byzantine corruption, we never realized just how effective it was.