Earthquake and Evil

It is a scene I thought I only see in movies. The massive human cataclysm unfolding before us in Haiti, maybe the worst in a century, calls the people of the world to rid our isolation and walls and summon that formidable human spirit of cooperation to help in any way possible for the immediate efforts of rehabilitating the people of Haiti. My prayers and thoughts go out to those who have suffered so much from this unspeakable tragedy and to the people working tirelessly to bring aid to them. This again is a product of evil. I do not assume to be an expert in theology however; I do want to make sense of this tragedy in the light of my faith. In my simple analysis, the evil is not the earthquake itself but something more elusive. Seeing the basic information of Haiti as a state, I can draw a picture of a basic example of how evil arising from human fallibility is perpetuated in human social structures. This evil formed into a weak country, the poorest in the western hemisphere suffering from corruption, poverty and lawless violence. These manmade forces eventually made manifest through weak reinforcement of their building code, lack of proper housing for the poor and poor literacy among their people. All these factors facilitated the destructive power of the earthquake which toppled almost all buildings in the Capital. Even their seat of government was not spared. So this is how I make sense of it all. It is the absence of good that enabled evil to perpetuate and eventually revealed its horrible face through this unspeakable human tragedy.