Narciso Palma, a 28-year-old American expatriate living in Taoyuan County, knows what it feels like to lose everything.
Six years ago, he was living in an apartment with his wife, Tamara, in Kenner, a suburb of New Orleans. They had just bought a car and furnished their apartment. He had a stable job working as a nursing assistant in a local hospital, while she was pursuing a master’s degree in anthropology.
However, a fateful date brought utter destruction into their lives. When Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, the floodwaters that breached the city’s levee system washed away everything they had, except for the few possessions they could cram into their car. They evacuated a day before the storm, driving seven hours amid gridlocked traffic under the scorching summer sun to Baton Rouge.
“We lost everything. Nothing was insured,” Palma said. “We did not prepare for the worst-case scenario and thought a car, an apartment and a stable job were insurance enough,” he said.
The two were homeless and jobless for two months, bouncing between Red Cross shelters, motels and homes of friends and relatives. They finally settled in Texas. Unable to get government financial help because they had misfiled their claims forms, they survived on Palma’s last paycheck, homeless shelter meals and a US$500 voucher for Wal-Mart provided by the Red Cross.
Three months after the storm, they went back to New Orleans to see what was left.
A mountain of garbage was piled outside their old apartment. The complex’s swimming pool contained filthy water that was black as tar. A dark mold covered all their old possessions.
“I heard this mold causes lung cancer, so I left everything. I didn’t want to bring any of that stuff back with me to Texas,” Palma said.
Fast-forward three years. The pair rebooted their lives in Asia, first teaching English in China for two years, and then in Taiwan since August last year. For them, life in Asia was a chance to start over and to leave their past behind.
However, on March 11, when Palma saw the images of the tsunami washing away Japan’s coastal communities, he immediately thought of his own experience.
“Japan was like a flashback to Katrina,” Palma said. “The scale was definitely larger and more immediate than in Louisiana, but at the end of the day, there are many parallels.”
Palma saw that the Japanese victims also faced homelessness after their neighborhoods were inundated, and that many had no idea what they would do next or where they would be able to live next. For those who lived in the evacuated zone near the stricken -Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, there is no telling when they will be allowed to return home. Exacerbating the situation, the Japanese government has also been slow to provide emergency aid to the disaster areas.
To help Japan and also to give back to the Red Cross, Palma organized a fundraiser at Revolver, a bar near Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei on Friday night.
The event was a visual and audio extravaganza, a feast of art and culture that only a son of New Orleans could cook up.
It featured local artists, who showcased their artwork on the walls throughout the three-story bar. Several DJs, including DJ Marcus Aurelius, DJ Torah and MC Shaman, spun a mix of funk, hip-hop and dance music until the wee hours of the morning.
Palma sold T-shirts of his own design to raise awareness for the relief aid that the Japanese victims still desperately need. All of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross Society of the Republic of China.
After six years, he is rebuilding his life on the other side of the world and raising money to help others who face a similar predicament to his own personal tragedy. Palma hopes Japan’s disaster will also give its people the renewal of spirit that he experienced.
“Katrina made me fearless to take on life as it comes,” Palma said. “It also made me realize that I owned a lot of stuff that I really didn’t need.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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