Bangkok--Jan 14--Francom Asia
First of all, the sheer scale of the devastation is on a level that I think nobody has seen before at least in this lifetime. It’s really on a scale that is just completely unfathomable. We have covered other disasters in the past but nothing like this. When you come into a city that has just been completely levelled and bodies are everywhere it is pretty difficult to stomach and if it is difficult for us you can imagine what it is like for the people that actually survived it.
Frankly, I was dreading it. I didn't know what to expect. I had seen some of the video coming out which was horrifying. Bodies of children piling up in the morgue and mothers just didn’t let go of their dead babies. These are horrific scenes. When we landed in Aceh, these are the kinds of scenes we were expecting and in some ways when we got there what we saw was worse because what we saw were mass graves, hundreds of bodies piled on top of each other being moved around by a bulldozer. When we got to the town we had to step over bodies in order to reach areas. One of the images that will always be in my mind is the great mosque of Aceh. This is a town that we visited in the past many times and the great mosque of Aceh is really symbolic of the spirit of the people in Aceh. It is a place that used to be very alive with lots of commerce. It is really the heart of town and when we got to the city the mosque was still standing but in a sea of debris and death. There wasn't one square inch, which wasn't covered with complete destruction and wreckage or bodies, and of course a lot of those bodies being children.
We were driving around the city. It was like a town of death. Everywhere you went along the river bodies had washed up and I remember one of the more horrifying thoughts. I had seen a small bundle by the side of the road wrapped up. I thought, maybe it was a body but it was so small. And of course as we went by and saw a little stiff hand come out we realized it was the body of a child. And it took a little while for that to sink in.
The kinds of experiences and devastation these children have been through were so horrific. You can try and sympathize with them but really there is no earthly way of understanding what they have been through. We talked to children who are just shattered. The only thing they can talk about is what happened to them. They can't talk about anything else and they just stare at you or cry and just tell you over and over again how they managed to survive and many of them do not remember how they survived. The other surprising thing about children is that they really are very resilient. In the face of all of this devastation they still have managed to smile, still managed to carry on. For those children that might not have been injured and survived the first earthquake and tsunami, they still have to live in the most dire conditions in these displacement camps and yet they find time to play, find help there. In many ways children are full of hope and they give hope to their parents and the adults around them.
We went to a particular hospital quite early in the crisis in Banda Aceh. We went in just to really see what the conditions were in the hospital. When we got there, there were patients everywhere who had not been treated at all. There were no doctors or staff, patients had not eaten anything in three days, and the morgue was spilling over with bodies. Amidst all this was a very small boy named Yuda about eight years old and he was just sitting on a bench there holding his eye and crying. We tried to talk to him but he could not say anything at all. All he could do was cry. And what was special about him was that there were two women lying next to him also injured by the Tsunami waves and they explained his story that he was found in the hospital crying near the morgue. They found him. He lost his parents. He doesn't even remember how he got to the hospital. And these two women had also lost their own families. They had lost their own children. And they had basically taken Yuda in as one of their own. In the midst of all this devastation and dislocation, they became a makeshift family and tried to comfort and help each other. It was a horrific scene but at the same time it was hopeful to see that these two women and this boy even with their horrific stories they were able to help each other without food, without medicine, without anybody else to help them, They were able to essentially keep themselves alive and hopeful until help was on the way.
Obviously for those children that have survived something as traumatic as this it will take a long time to recover even if on the surface they are smiling and resilient. One of the things I do remember was going to the west coast town of Mulabo, which was an area completely, devastated - 80 percent of it washed out to sea and anywhere between a quarter to half the population believed to have been killed. We saw children, women and men picking through the debris really scavenging for anything that might help them survive the next couple of days until help got there. One of the touching things to see was that among the things that they collected from buckets to wood were also stuffed animals and toys, and those are the things that children need to be reminded that despite the devastating times, they are still children and they need those things to help them move on.
In a situation like this, reporters’ neutrality, I don't know if it even exists. You get so swept up in what is happening and the best you can do is try and maintain your professionalism and remember what you are doing is communicating the story. You could be emotionally affected by it, but you have to make sure you get that story out because that is the one thing that they want the most. And when we visited that hospital in Banda Aceh, surrounded by so many people saying, “Why isn't the world helping us?” you have to tell the world to get aid here faster. That by far was the most overwhelming moment because that is when it hits you that your job isn't just edit a story and put it out that you are helping people, even if you are just telling the world what's going on. These people on the ground, these kids they are relying on you to get the word out. So they can get help and it's pretty hard not to be overwhelmed. I can tell you a lot of crying went on in that hospital.
There have been some bright sides amidst all this devastation. Some of the best stuff has come out when we are finally able to get those stories out and we are able to tell the world what's happening here and we really get some tremendous responses from people. We have had some e-mails about Yuda, the eight-year-old boy in the hospital. People are really concerned, offering to adopt him. Offering to give help in any way they can and that' is very heartening itself. It is heartening to know that when we show, for example, that you can access some of these remote regions and we put a story on the air, immediately after relief agencies call us up about the people we feature in the stories saying, “How can we get there? How can we help?” and that's good. And I think the other bright side to this is that even in the most devastated areas like the west coast of Aceh that was completely cut off from the rest of the world, probably 50 percent of the population gone, even then the families there, what is left of the families there, they bond together. They help each other the best they can even if they have nothing and that in itself is heartening. When we arrive in these places they greet us with overwhelming warmth and hospitality even though they literally have nothing. And that's a bright side, that's a side of human nature that sometimes you cannot always capture on camera. End.