Bangkok--Jan 14--Francom Asia
I think this story was just massive. It was just huge. It hit you on every level: emotional, physical and mental. A big part of that were the kids. When you see a child in a setting of devastation, it’s just a visceral response. There is nothing that can prevent you from feeling that you are part of the story at that point. There are no walls that are strong enough to separate you from what you are covering when you see a scene like that. The images of this story were just so powerful and so emotional. You were living this every minute of every day. It wasn't something that you walked away from at the end of the day and came back to in the morning. It was something that you were just part of. It was hard not to internalize it. It was incredibly difficult to digest some of the things you saw, especially with kids. To see them utterly helpless, incapable of understanding the enormity of what this was, was really the most difficult part because they had no idea what was in store for them. For some of them, you know, it was tragedy upon tragedy in terms of what the days brought.
In terms of moments, covering this story has been unlike anything else I have ever done. Each moment I think is permanent, indelible in my mind. I have never had a situation before where every day I was seeing things of just such obscene tragedy, of incredible inspiration, such visceral emotion. The moments I know that I have seen here are permanent. They are here forever, it’s hard to imagine them going away.
The ones that I think stick out the most is when we went to the relief center which was kind of the heart of all the operations in the area in Phuket. It was this surreal kind of walkway. It was just a sidewalk basically no more than two or three feet wide and it was this dual wall that was set up. On one side was kind of the wall of hope; it was these pictures of kids that were missing that really caught my eye. There were pictures of everyone, but you would see some of these photos of a five-year-old German boy with his mother's phone number and she made that sign in the past few days somewhere in Phuket. You saw so many kids’ pictures there with their parent's numbers and you couldn’t help but feel for the situation. The parents were doing nothing more than wandering about this island, kind of like zombies. Just unaware of what to do. You can’t leave until you know what happened to your child.
Just a few feet across were photos of the dead taken for identification purposes. So you had these very lively pictures of these beautiful kids who their parents were desperately looking for and just a few feet across from them the pictures of those that already we knew didn’t make it. The pictures of kids who were dead and the parents that had to come there and see that and maybe find joy in the fact that they have closure was so horrific and it was in the open. There was no privacy because there was no time to really set anything up so people were just milling about looking at these photos. To see someone come across one that they recognize, come across a relative they have been looking for is just something that no one should go through, especially in that sort of public way. That was definitely one moment that stuck in my mind.
The starkest moment you know, that I know will forever be with it and me was so emblematic of the strong bond that exists between a parent and a child was when we went to Phang Nag, which was the hardest hit area in southern Thailand. We were doing reports during the day and to our left was a mother who was sitting just kind of on a blanket, very simply looking out at the devastation that was behind us and that's where her daughter last was. And that’s the last place she knew where she was. This was now three days later and everyday all she could do was just come there, sit there and look out with this somber face. No emotion really. She just hoped and prayed that her daughter would stumble back to that site. That's all she could do. By the third day you definitely got the sense that some sort of grief was slowly creeping in and that the inevitable reality was perhaps was starting to sink in. I think it is in those moments that the bond between a parent and a child is so unimaginably powerful and it becomes so clear it’s the unspoken bond that exists between parents and children that doesn’t exist in terms of anything explicit. But when you see these moments, these snapshots, they define that relationship.
The first few days when I got here and spoke to the tourists who were here, I realized the savage brutality of what this was. And the choices that some of them had to make. One that I met spoke of the waters rising. She could only really cling one hand to something and hold on to one of the two children that she had. She had to make the choice as to which child she was going to let go of and she chose to hold on to the younger one and luckily the older one was able to grab hold, but that choice is unimaginable. It is something that no person should ever confront, yet there it came in just mere moments. It was seconds between pristine tranquility here, kids playing on the sand, kids swimming out into the ocean, the day after Christmas, the best time to be a child, and then these roaring waves came and they saw sights unseen.
They saw sights unseen. They saw things that people go their whole lives never having to confront. The dead bodies floating around you and your parents completely washed away. I think to comprehend was the stunning loss of innocence, especially when you look in a lot of kids' eyes the day after. It was bewilderment and you really get a sense that whatever innocence was there, at some level had to be lost. These were images that they had seen forever going to be in their mind and in some way we are going to shape their lives from here on. You couldn't help but to feel for them and hope that somehow, some way they were going to come to grips with what happened.
The one thing about children in this story is that it shows the indiscriminate, vulgar, brutal savage part of nature that the helpless like these kids were sometimes the first to go and at times the last to go. But that they went at all. I think this reminds us of how small perhaps we are as humans that something so massive could wipe out so many in so little time and the children would really be such a big part of that is tough for all of us to digest. But at some level it is incredibly humbling because it puts a lot in perspective.
One of the more difficult sights to see is children who survived just wandering. These kids that made it through something so incredibly horrific. There should be some sort of luck in that, yet the aftermath for them is equally worse if not, more difficult because now they are homeless. They are helpless and preyed upon. This is difficult to digest and yet each time you pass one child, you see their eyes and how helpless they are. It is so difficult not to try and reach out. You fear for all of them and what will happen to them in this aftermath. End.