Cultural Differences

"Even ladies who don't come outside came outside."
Najam Uddin, hotel clerk, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on the effects on residents of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Saturday morning near the disputed Kashmir region of Pakistan and India

purdah
noun
1. A curtain or screen, used mainly in India to keep women separate from men or strangers.
2. The Hindu or Muslim system of sex segregation, practiced especially by keeping women in seclusion.
"purdah." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Answers.com GuruNet Corp. 08 Oct. 2005. http://www.answers.com/topic/purdah

Today my thoughts are with the more than 2000 victims of the South Asian quake, as well as the more than 1400 victims of the mudslide in the Lake Atitlanin region of Guatemala.

edit, Sunday: Now the estimate of the dead is 30,000 in South Asia. Awful.