A Disaster Waiting to Happen

This week, besides regular language study and the birthday of one of my children, has been consumed by my preparations for a presentation I have to give next week.
As part of my training, I have the chance to study more in depth each week, in English, about the region where I will be posted with others who are going there. I think I've written about this in a previous post, but there you have it again. As part of our study we each have the opportunity to do some kind of independent research and present it to the rest of the class. We are supposed to pick something about that part of the world, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines, in our case, and also pick something, hopefully, that relates to the job.

This whole week and all day Saturday I have been spending any spare moment gathering more information and putting it together for the presentation I will give on Natural Disasters in Maritime Southeast Asia. It is hard not to get distracted watching YouTube videos of volcanoes exploding or hearing again about how when Tambora exploded it lowered the average temperature of the world that year which had all sorts of consequences around the world. This was the biggest volcanic explosion in recorded human history and it happened in 1815 in Indonesia.
One of the most interesting consequences of Tambora exploding, in my mind, is that the summer of 1816 was especially cool in New England and many farmers even had crops fail because of late frosts. It was a contributor to a lot of problems around that time. (There was also a big financial crisis about that time in the U.S.) What is so interesting about this to me is that this is one of the main reasons the Smith family moved west to Palmyra, New York. They moved there and rented some land that they began to work to try to dig themselves back from the failures they had suffered. Part of the problem was caused by maybe the largest volcanic eruption in human history, which they knew nothing about. But they were put right where the Lord wanted them so that Joseph could begin the work of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The chain of events is just so fascinating to me. Amazing. The Lord can always make something good come of any natural disaster if we will listen to Him and follow Him. Something to think about.