Bangkok--Jan 14--Francom Asia
I don’t like comparing disasters and tragedies because I think every disaster is horrible in its own way. For the people caught up in it, if you are drowning it makes no difference whether you’re drowning in the 14th largest disaster or the 57th largest disaster. It's irrelevant to the person that's suffering. It becomes an attempt to beat the world record sort of thing. Sometimes, we can lose focus with the fact that people are suffering, suffering as an absolute. Suffering is suffering and the rest doesn’t really matter that much.
At the same time, this tragic disaster is mind-boggling. Every day, especially in the first week you would think to yourself ‘God this is enormous’ and by the end of that day, you would be thinking that this is bigger than I imagined and the next day it would keep on getting bigger and bigger. The scale of this, the degree of the loss in some places, the sense of annihilation that came out of this wave is unimaginable.
It is an odd thing. Short of the last ice age, I can’t think of any other catastrophe that is entirely natural and has caused such a change to so many people across such a vast area. This is a truly global thing. Something that happens off the coast of Sumatra becomes Sweden’s worst ever-natural disaster.
It was one thing to watch bodies being pulled out of this particular place off the Sri Lankan coast. Lining them up. The smell was awful. It was grim and the recovery business had been going on for ages. It had become just work and dehumanized. The bodies were sort of stacked up without any particular grace or dignity and a piece of earth-moving equipment was being brought in to dig holes where they were going to dump all these bodies into the ground. They went ahead to start dumping them.
I remember seeing one little girl who was probably about 3-4 years old, stiff with rigamortis and these guys were working hard to shift bodies and bury them. One of these guys picked up this girl’s body by the arm and sort of turned and flung the body into the hole. We weren’t filming any of this at any stage; we were trying to convey the notion of mass graves, the necessity for them and that sort of thing. But I looked at that scene and I saw the cameraman who wasn’t rolling at that time looking at it and a few seconds later, he turned around and our eyes just sort of met for a second. There is nothing you can say. There is nothing that needed to be said about it.
We see children in these displaced people camps playing and laughing and improvising games. When we turn up with a camera, odd-looking western-folk, laughing and giggling at how silly we look, whatever it is that's in the head of these children, but then it’s so close under the surface. We talked to a little girl yesterday, she was smiling and she was sweet. Then in an instant, she was weeping. She was twelve years old. Not a little girl, not one given to having these sorts of changes and the sense that there is a very fragile veneer of some sort of normal life, some normal play.
We saw a 13-year-old boy in the hospital and he wasn’t injured in any way but he simply had not spoken a word since the wave had come through and wiped out his house. It was painful looking at that boy and there was deep trouble going on behind his eyes.
One of the things I experienced is that amongst so many people here, no one is feeling sorry for themselves. No one. If this had happened to one person or a family, they could wail to the world "Why has this happened to me”. There is no self-pity but there is grief, suffering, loss, confusion, and bewilderment. I haven’t seen anyone showing self-pity or saying it's all about them. There is something gently inspiring about that.
We met a woman yesterday who was a grandmother, taking in three of her grandchildren, one of whom was a boy who was so traumatized by what had happened that he hadn’t spoken since the wave came through. He was sitting in a hospital with no injuries. There were two other girls, sweet, but also plainly traumatized. This woman she took in these kids and I said to her, "You didn’t expect to be at your age with no money, no house, you didn’t expect to be raising three kids?" and she replied, “No I’ll raise them. It will make my life better. They are trying to make life important for them.” I walked away from that woman. She had a cataract in her eye and she was so tiny. She was just not what you would think if you wanted to think of a strong person but she was doing the right thing, looking for the future. End.