Pre-Departure Paper
One critical environmental issuefacing my home country, Indonesia, is natural disasters. BecauseIndonesia is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire, an area with a high degree of tectonic activity,every day we livein the fear of big risks of volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes and tsunami that can attack us at any time. In fact, since the past 20 years,my country has made global deadlines because of the deaths of thousands of humans’ lives and animalsas well as destructive effects on the land and infrastructures destroyed by the disasters.Among the disasters, the most critical ones are earthquakes and tsunami.For example, we still could not forget the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the third-largest earthquake ever recorded with the magnitude of 9.1 that killed almost 3 hundred thousands of people throughout the world.Six years after that(2010), another big shock of earthquake with magnitude of 7.1 hit my country again. It was even reported to be felt in Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Thailand. The last one is the 2016 Aceh earthquake with the magnitude of 6.5. It killed a hundred of people, at least injured a thousand and destroyed many infrastructures in my country.The same disasters may come and hitmy country again at anytime and no one can predict.
I am interested in disaster mitigation because of some reasons.First, I live in Aceh, the epicenter of the three disasters mentioned previously, so I witnessed them first-hand.Furthermore, my relative and I also became the victim of the disasters.In addition, thegovernment seems to put little attention to cope with the disasters and to improve the conditions, while the disasters may come at any time.The experiences and conditions encourage me to do something helpful related to the disasters and I think thatthere are no other reasons better than helping other people’s life.
While in the U.S,I want to learn about disaster mitigations and environmental education.I think all Southeast Asian countries are prone to earthquake and tsunami, so we canshare our experiences, discuss how to cope with the disaster, and design a project related to the disasters.
The potential action I want to do in my house country is I want to implement a disaster mitigation project focused on earthquakes and tsunami and aimed at educating students though interesting and creative ways, such as games, in order to be able design their school map, evacuation route, temporary shelters, and estimated flooded areas during earthquakes and tsunami. I dream that every school in my country has them in the future.