Hello, everyone. In this unit, we're going to focus on disaster. Sadly, disasters are very common around the world, and every year millions of children have to face these overwhelming calamities. In recent years, there have been many important and devastating disasters around the world. These include tsunami and earthquakes that cause a tsunami, in this case the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 which killed over 200,000 people. We see hurricanes every year, hurricane Katrina had a devastating effect on the United States and surrounding islands in 2005. In China, in 2008, the Sichuan earthquake had an in, took an enormous toll of deaths and injuries, particularly to communities and their school children. In 2011, a massive earthquake off the coast of Japan caused a huge tsunami and the subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant. And that disaster is still unfolding. And in 2011, just a few months later, the Joplin tornado, an F5 tornado, struck a small community in Missouri and destroyed many homes and schools in that area. And more recently, we've had one of the largest typhoons ever seen and recorded in the world. All of, what all these disasters have in common is that they often are abrupt. They happen without warning. They surprise many people and they are overwhelmingly devastating. They cause threats to life or loss of life to many, many people. And many systems are destroyed or damaged, systems of all levels. Government systems, family systems, school systems, communication systems, and so forth. Often the whole world tries to respond to help out with these massive disasters, and recovery can take a very long time. We need research to understand disasters, because that will help us to prepare better, to put into place the kind of emergency services that we need to try to reduce the harm to children and societies. And, also, to try to facilitate recovery and promote the resilience that we'd all want to see in our children and societies after these devastating experiences. However, it's very difficult to do research in the context of a disaster for many reasons. First of all, it's important to remember that in a, in the middle of a tragedy or trauma, it's very difficult to carry out research. We don't want to stress people that are already going through very difficult situation. Often disasters happen without waning, so we don't have the right research available. A lot of the infrastructure is destroyed by these kinds of disasters. We may not have the computers or communication systems that we need to do research. We also may not have measures appropriate for the people who've been affected. And sometimes disasters happen in very remote ariers, areas where it's very difficult to go in and, and do any kind of research to try and understand what's helping the people in that situation. And often we don't know how children, for example, were doing before the disaster struck. And so we have to figure out the effects without knowing how the children were doing beforehand. This week we're going to talk about a lot of these issues, but I think it's very important that everyone begin by trying to experience watching real footage about a disaster that's happened in recent years somewhere around the world. You can choose any disaster that is important in your own life and experience or you can choose one of the disasters that we're going to focus on in this section of the course. I've listed some of them here and there'll be another list on the course website for you to consider. But these videos are very powerful. You can find them online. Some of them are recorded by accident. Right when a disaster is happening. Others are the result of social, social media. As people all over the world experience disasters and try to capture them on film. We're going to talk about the research that has been done and what has been learned about the effects of disaster on child development. And we will look at normal reactions, the effects of dose, how severe the exposure is on how children respond. We'll also look at developmental differences and the short and long-term recovery patterns that we see after disaster. And then we will talk about resilience and recovery. What makes the difference? What helps children and their families to prepare for and recover from disaster? And we will talk about the lessons learned from this kind of research and how we might try to prepare in the future for disasters that have yet to come. And we'll take a particular look at a National Academies infographic. This is a poster that summarizes the ideas from research on disaster with some lessons about what we might do to apply that in preparation for disasters. [SOUND]
