Received the following report (abridged) via an email newsletter that I subscribe to.
-NW

International Living Postcards — your daily escape
Thursday, April 21, 2016

We're interrupting our usual schedule to bring you a bulletin from IL Editor, Dan Prescher, who has made his home in Ecuador.

A natural disaster struck his adopted country five days ago and he wants to tell you about it.

Please read on.

Nazareen Heazle
Managing Editor, IL Postcards

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What's Happening in Ecuador?

My wife, Suzan, and I were in the U.S. for a conference when Ecuador was hit by its biggest earthquake in decades. We learned of it immediately from our friends and neighbors in our hometown of Cotacachi in the Andes Mountains in northern Ecuador, where the quake was felt but caused no extensive damage.

The story was different on Ecuador's northern Pacific coast. Entire towns have been flattened. Hundreds... perhaps thousands... of people have died, and thousands more have been injured or left homeless.

...

Although the entire country has been hit emotionally by the earthquake, only a small part has been affected physically. The southern coast, the mountains, the rainforest, the Galapagos Islands, and major population and tourist areas including Quito, Cuenca, Loja, Vilcabamba, Otavalo, and our hometown of Cotacachi are largely unscathed.

The entire country is devoting all its available resources to helping victims of this natural disaster, but the country's resources depend in large part on tourism and foreign investment. The people of Ecuador are saying much the same thing we heard on Ambergris Caye after Mitch... the best way you can help in the long run is simply to be here, to continue to do business here, to keep visiting here, staying here, living here, enjoying yourself here.

It seems counterintuitive in the face of so many lost lives, so much destruction, so much suffering and pain in places like Portoviego, Pedernales, Canoa, Bahia, Manta, San Clemente, and the many little fishing villages along Ecuador's northern coast that bore the brunt of the earthquake.

But it's true... the worst possible thing to do is write off the entire country as a place to visit or invest. That would simply choke off a major source of revenue and resources that Ecuador will sorely need to rebuild the affected area and try to heal the lives of the people there.

Natural disasters are...natural. They are an unavoidable part of the mechanics of the planet. They happen to varying degrees and in varying ways in every corner of the globe.

And it's the nature of the people stricken by these natural events to mourn, to pick themselves up, and to rebuild. In many ways, that's the main story line of human civilization. It's what we do in the face of natural forces that are largely out of our control. And in reality, as much as we like to pretend otherwise, almost everything in nature is ultimately out of our control...