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There's nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

Accidents happen, whether they're car accidents, friendly fire, drug overdoses. Accidents happen, and they're tragic. It's like a bomb that goes off and pieces of shrapnel rip into the flesh of the family. It's the families that need the compassion, because everywhere they walk, every day, someone reminds them of their loss.

Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

When the systems we expect to help us actually hurt us, we have tragedy.

Every three seconds in the developing world, a child dies needlessly due to lack of basic health care and other things we all take for granted.

Whenever an earthquake or tsunami takes thousands of innocent lives, a shocked world talks of little else. I'll never forget the wrenching days I spent in Haiti last year for Save the Children just weeks after the earthquake.

You know that a lot of people go to emergency rooms when they don't really need to.

We had had several mine disasters where workers, some of the workers were rescued. It was, you know, who was lucky and who weren't. Some would find the air pockets But, in this one, bam, it was just, everybody was gone and it greatly depressed the state.

These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur.