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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (80041)	12/31/2003 4:26:16 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I find it stimulating and useful to try to understand people's opinions. It's the "understand" that's the problem.

To: epicure who wrote (80041)	12/31/2003 4:32:21 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

There is a picture of the man at this link. What an awful story. azstarnet.com Iranian quake exacted harsh toll on local man A.E. Araiza / Staff Jahangir Khorasani Bam, who lives in Tucson, may have lost 90 relatives in the earthquake that has devastated Bam, Iraq. By Carol Ann Alaimo ARIZONA DAILY STAR In his Tucson living room, Jahangir Khorasani Bam stares with hollow eyes at a stack of photos of loved ones he will never see alive again. Scores of aunts, uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews are smartly dressed and smiling in the snapshots taken at a family wedding in Iran last year. Now they're all dead - victims of a massive earthquake that leveled their homes the day after Christmas in the ancient Middle Eastern city of Bam. More than 60 members of Khorasani Bam's extended family were killed, he said, and another 30 or so are missing and feared dead under the rubble of their dwellings. Tears flow as he points to one relative after another in the photos, reciting a wrenching litany of their respective fates. "This is my niece. Half her face was torn off. Her husband and his whole family died," he said. "This one is my brother. He's injured and his kids are dead," Khorasani Bam said Tuesday through a Persian language interpreter. "This one is my nephew. He's 24. They pulled him out of his house after 12 hours and he died on the way to the hospital." "Sometimes I wish I died with them so I wouldn't have to feel this pain," said Khorasani Bam, 52, an Iranian immigrant who came to Tucson a year ago, joining his wife and their two sons ages 18 and 24. The couple also has a 26-year-old daughter who still lives in Bam. She survived because she happened to be visiting relatives in a nearby town at the time of the quake, Khorasani Bam said. He said his daughter is devastated by grief and the family hopes to get permission to bring her to America to recover. He plans to go to Iran as soon as U.S. immigration officials give permission. The magnitude of the family's loss is incomprehensible by Western standards where most families have a handful of offspring. In Iran, Khorasani Bam said his situation is not unusual. He comes from a family of eight children, each of whom married and had several children. Counting aunts, uncles, first and second cousins and nieces and nephews, his extended family numbers well in excess of 100 people, he said. All of them hail from Bam, an ancient city about 600 miles southeast of the Iranian capital of Tehran. Because of the city's advanced age - some structures in Bam are said to date back 2,000 years - much of its building stock was made of mud adobe long before modern rules required structures to be more earthquake-resistant. Iranian officials said Tuesday the death toll from the quake could reach 50,000, making it one of the most lethal quakes in history. For Khorasani Bam, news footage of flattened buildings and bodies being pulled from wreckage is almost unbearable to watch. Along with his family members, he lost all ties to the historic area that sustained them for generations. "Everything I knew is gone," he said. "When they show it on TV, nothing is there. All our memories are gone." Khorasani Bam - the second part of his surname comes from his native city - said he learned of the death toll in his family in a phone call from one of his brothers on Monday. Tucsonan Mohammad Pessarakli, a plant scientist at the University of Arizona who is also an Iran native and runs an informal support system for other immigrants, said Khorasani Bam was staggered with grief when he got the news. "He kept saying, 'All my family is gone, I don't know what to do.' And then he started to cry," Pessarakli said. Khorasani Bam said he prays that America and other nations will be generous in helping his homeland cope with the disaster. "The ones who are dead, it's too late for them. But the ones who are alive really need help - not just my family but all of them." Some news reports Tuesday said Iranian children left homeless in the quake were freezing to death at night and that food, blankets and other supplies were urgently needed.