Some people say Typhoon Haiyan was the most powerful storm to ever hit land. It was extremely devastating for the people of the Philippines; millions of people have been affected, thousands have died or gone missing, and many survivors have had to wait days on end to reach food, water, shelter, or safety.

Reading about this devastating storm, I am saddened to hear all that has happened; yet the full impact doesn’t reach me right away. Why? Because this storm and these statistics are out of my comfort zone and are hard to visualize. One million people sounds like a lot, but what is it really? “Numbers so large are truly hard to understand and hard to bring back and relate to my everyday life,” says junior Olivia Smith.

You need to approach a news story like you would a word problem in a math or science class: you must pick out the facts and apply them. After doing some research, I discovered that those two million people affected by the storm are equal to three times the entire population of the city of Boston. Can you imagine those apartments, homes, and offices completely empty? Think about what it would be like: a city three times as large as Boston would be a complete ghost town.

This data was officially released on November 15th, 2013, nearly a week after the storm hit on November 8th, 2013, and yet the statistics keep rising. The devastation was enormous but not everyone knows of it. Our Williston heads are stuck looking down at our Surfaces and counting days until Winter Break, not records of storms across the world. “I wish that this was a topic that I was up to date with, but it’s simply not,” continued Ms. Smith. She says she feels “out of touch with the enormity of the damage.”

Typhoon Haiyan produced gusts of wind up to 235 miles per hour. To put this into perspective, roofs of buildings and windows can fly off or break at 60 miles per hour. These winds were four times that strength.

During the course of the storm, over 287,000 homes in the nation were severely damaged. Not only is that a greater number than all the people you have met and will ever meet, it is nearly the same number as the entire population of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

My first reaction to this information was to visualize it, yet I found it utterly impossible. How can we picture 287,000 homes if the streets we live on have ten?

“It makes me stop and think about ‘what if it were me’,” says sophomore Rachel Rockwell. To “stop and think” is something that is not done enough. As Harper Lee eloquently wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Unfortunately, the walking around in it part is out of bounds for us as students and for the world as a whole. Responders to the disaster have had a very difficult time accessing the hardest-hit areas of the country, yet thirty-three medical support teams have already arrived, and more than a dozen more are expected.

The best way to compensate for a lack of real world experience is to read articles and pay attention to the news. An article published in The New York Times in 2007 stated that most people under thirty rarely follow the news. “Since I am a boarding student, I do not get a chance to watch the news. I read about it and heard about it through friends and family, but I think I know very little,” says sophomore Grace McMeekin.

The news is important to follow because it explains what is going on in the world. You gain information, comprehend world events, and, on a simplistic level, understand world references and prevent feeling “out of touch”. No story is too far away for you to care about when you consider connections.

Frigyes Karinthy first introduced the idea of six degrees of separation in 1929. This means that you know someone, who knows someone else, who knows someone else, and so on through a maximum of six people before you now have a connection with any random person across the world. The same goes for news. Somewhere you know someone affected. “It could affect [you] in some way even if [you] don’t think it will,” says Ms. Rockwell.

When I hear one thousand I hear “a lot,” not an exact number. Next time you pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV, or listen to the radio, pay attention to those numbers in the news and try to visualize them. Does it mean cities of people, or the Williston campus? Does it mean 10 acres or 100 acres? Is it the size of a football field or a town? You want to be the one who knows what is going on in the world, not the one who is ignorant and “out of touch”. So make it that way.