(Week 2 )R.I.P. for the Victims in Haiti by Ivan, Ann and Cherry

January 12, 2010 was a normal day for most of the people. However, it was an unforgettable day for Haiti citizens. It was because at the 12th of January a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti. News has been flooding through different media channels to people all over the world since the quake. And people like me start to know what is Haiti, where is that place and what is exactly going on there.

Today is 24th of January. Throughout the twelves days after the disaster, different media have kept updating the current situation of Haiti day by day. Citizens in Hong Kong like me have been exposed to different kinds of media and we have seen a lot of stories about the earthquake in Haiti. I notice that there are differences as well as some common grounds between the reports of two types of media-the local media and the global media.

The common ground of them is that both media reported the damage of the place and buildings, the desperate faces of the citizens there, and the help given by people from all over the world.

However, there is a difference between local report and global report. For local report that I saw like TVB jade news report and Oriental Daily, they reported the current situation in Haiti, especially how poor those people were. And a lot of coverage were used to report the death of those Chinese Peacekeepers in Haiti. On the other hand, for TVB Pearl and YouTube, these global media channels, besides reporting the disaster, they were broadcasting some donation shows conducted by US media for Haiti victims.

As far as I am concerned, the reason why there is such a difference is that Hong Kong people are Chinese after all. And those victims are not Chinese in any sense. We naturally concern less about the race that is not the same with us. That’s why they put lots of coverage in the transportation of the body of Chinese Peacekeepers back to China. Considering the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China, Hong Kong media kept encouraging people to donate actively. Local television broadcasting companies organized a lot of fund raising shows to help Chinese victims. Finally, Hong Kong people actively donated a huge amount of money to help the victims in Sichuan earthquake.

What I learn from this phenomenon is that love has differences. We love people within boundary. However, I think the world is sort of a family. Through globalization and advancement in technology, human seems to be getting closer. So I think we need to help people no matter where they belong or what the color of their skin is. The reason why human can live for over two hundred thousand years is that we live in a group and help each other to construct community, society, nation and finally the world.