CAIRO, 4 January 2005 — The tsunami responsible for the devastation of so many lives, has also elicited a flood of conflicting emotions and, for many, a reappraisal of life’s priorities. Never before has a natural disaster had such a global impact, partly due to the massiveness of its scale, and partly because of the ease with which instant pictures beam into our homes from comparatively inaccessible spots.
For me, the waves, which cruelly robbed 150,000 of their lives and hundreds of thousands more of their livelihoods, leaving up to a million homeless, signify a life-altering experience.
As someone who has lived in Thailand and planned to return, my first thought upon hearing the news was a selfish “There but for the grace of God...”
Then, I began to empathize in a deeply painful fashion with individuals who had lost every single member of their family in a single stroke trying to imagine their suffering.
How does a person cope after watching not one of his children, but all of them being washed out to sea, while his mother is in the hospital and his wife missing?
What must it be like to forfeit everything one has worked for one’s entire life to the ocean...house, business, car and clothes, down to the cherished family album?
How many dreams have been quashed, and how many nightmares riddled with bloated bodies and children’s terrified screams have taken their place? How do people who have experienced the unimaginable carry on?
But that was before I heard the stories, poignant and courageous. Foreign survivors in Phuket spoke of the incredible hospitality of the Thai people, who despite their own losses shared meager supplies of food and essentials and helped with the search for missing loved ones.
In return, many of those tourists, including young backpackers and elderly women, stayed on as volunteers in the relief effort to tackle the horrendous job of placing bodies in bags and keeping them in ice until they could be claimed or identified. There were others who, understandably, couldn’t wait to get on the next plane and head home. Which choice would I have made? The answer still eludes me.
One of the many tales that moistened my own cheeks was that of a young woman interviewed at an airport while clutching the hands of two small boys. Fighting to maintain her composure, she told how the wave dragged her along with her two sons and threatened to drown all of them, as she was unable to keep above water while holding their hands. And so she had to make the hardest decision of her life.
Which son should she let go of in order one may live? She reluctantly chose the eldest to brave the current alone even though he couldn’t swim. He miraculously survived by instinctively dog paddling. Physically unscarred, he stood at her side but covered his tiny face throughout her heart-wrenching account. Who knows, though, what mental anguish he will undergo knowing he was the sacrificed child.
The story of how a 10-year-old girl saved many from being swept off from a Thai beach because she remembered a geography lesson on tsunamis when the tide went out and the sea bubbled highlights how crucial education really is.
Sadly, there are always those few hoaxers who thrive on increasing the misery of others, such as the creature with a hole instead of a heart who on the Sky News website falsely informed anxious relatives that their family members were confirmed dead.
When I heard about the torrent of currency filling the coffers of charities my seriously eroded belief in the goodness of human nature began to be restored. In Britain alone, ordinary people outdid the government in their generosity, shaming Whitehall into increasing its aid package.
Children got together to sell their recently received Christmas gifts; senior citizens, barely able to exist on their pensions, wrote out sizable checks, while Oxfam is so overwhelmed with donations of clothes, it is asking for 10,000 volunteers to sort them out.
Faced with an overwhelming public response, governments began to compete over which could donate the most with the US increasing its pledge ten-fold after accusations of stinginess and unfavorable comparisons with its bountiful aid to hurricane-torn Florida, as well as the billions unstintingly lavished on the invasion of Iraq.
Indeed, I couldn’t help wondering what an extra-terrestrial might make of our planet, where civilian casualties of war are not even worth counting or acknowledging. Especially when the same aggressive governments directly responsible for the deaths and injuries of over 100,000 Iraqis and the orphaning of so many youngsters, are spearheading the relief efforts in another part of the world. He, she or it would be sure to ask: Are some human beings more valuable than others?
In Thailand, some are already asking that question, blaming their government for pushing food and medical resources in the way of wealthy Westerners while abandoning their own at the end of the queue.
Today the global pot stands at over $2 billion but bureaucratic wheels run slow and there are squabbles over overall coordination. In the meantime, many in Sri Lanka and the Indonesian province of Aceh are desperate for potable water, food, utensils, medicines and temporary shelter. Aid workers pray they will arrive before outbreaks of disease further ravage those blighted lands.
I pray that in spite of their trauma and loss, those who survive will find solace and solidarity amid their own fractured communities, eventually being able to piece together their shattered lives.
My personal lessons out of all this are the realization of how precious the gift of life truly is and how transient and fleeting is our time on this Earth. The wave didn’t differentiate between rich or poor; Muslim, Jew or Christian; black or white, and neither, dear fellow travelers through the human condition, should we.
— Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback.
