Being poor and young in Africa does not mean that you cannot dream.
A few feet of water may push into houses and offices. The costs can get into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but deaths are rare. Trouble at Lake Okeechobee, however, could be a nightmare.
After 40 years of describing hurricanes in the dispassionate, clinical terms of engineers and meteorologists forecasters have now rewritten the guidelines on hurricanes to make the impact of high winds more vivid.
Out of South Africa came the news that an expensive new soccer stadium had been built in a city where drinking water is often dirty and many people have neither electric lights nor toilets.
Lake Victoria, one of the largest fresh water lakes in the world, is suffering. It is polluted with raw sewage and it is muddy from the erosion of soil from nearby hills that have lost trees and shrubs to people in search of firewood.
Some aid projects have focused on restoring the country's forests, but few have tried to fix the generations of harm that has been done to Haiti's coral, its mangroves, its beaches and, most of all, its fish.
Strong leadership is missing. A few members of Congress have been working on the water problem and Matt Damon, the actor, has made it his cause. But the issue is not getting traction.
Most of the country's trees had long since been chopped down for firewood. Much of the topsoil had washed away and when the rain got heavy, the bare hills and mountains became launch pads for floods.
Researchers have designed open-air laboratories that are big enough for birds and fish to come in and react to what is going on. They become part of the experiment.
The task of restoring Haiti's countryside is extremely difficult and could even be impossible. But the restoration work for a healthy countryside would provide more food and jobs, and make flooding less severe.
Now with parts of Haiti in ruin and perhaps 200,000 people dead, the tree-planting and the soil sampling have halted. But the catastrophe makes it more critical than ever that Haiti be re-greened.
As the rebuilding of Haiti gets underway, billions of dollars are going to be spent. Some of those dollars, perhaps a billion or more, should be dedicated to cleaning up the country's drinking water.
Widespread confusion over short-term fluctuations in temperature and long-term trends is causing concern among the majority of scientists who are convinced that climate change is happening.
Greg Allgood will do almost anything to draw attention to the huge number of poor people - more than 1 billion - whose only drinking water is loaded with bacteria and viruses.
Kenna was born in Ethiopia in East Africa and came to the United States with his parents when he was three. Africa is the part of the world where the most people are struggling with unhealthy drinking water.
It was stories like that, said Mr. Zemedkun's son, the singer-song writer Kenna, that inspired him to organize an expedition of Hollywood entertainers and others to climb the highest mountain in Africa.
