Disasters should be a foreign thing to us.
What does it mean when water pours into our lives? We never fear rivers or oceans. We do not have tsunamis. People do not die in scores in America unless something goes horribly wrong. These are the things that separate us from the developing world: we have infrastructure, fallbacks, and adequate government. Hurricane Katrina has given Americans something enormous to digest. I am on the other side of the world trying to help people, but how does compassion fit into disasters of such magnitude? This has been a strange time for me in Asia.
Weeks ago, and hours before I stepped on the plane to return here after a full year at home, I found an email forwarded to me from a friend. The email said that a small town in the north of Thailand called Pai, one of my favorite places in the whole of southeast Asia, had been destroyed. The email cited water – a river breaching its banks – horrible flooding.
I arrived in a muggy Bangkok, and sweated out my first week adjusting to the thick heat, trying to get in touch with people in the region who might have been able to help. I tapped old contacts, made new ones. Anyone and everyone received an email, from Tsunami relief workers to orphanages. I received many replies that all confirmed the same thing – there were virtually no humanitarian projects in all of the flooded areas of the north. No one could even tell me what had happened.
During this time, I watched the world news as tropical storm Katrina swelled into a hurricane.
I called the woman who wrote the original tragic email about the floods in the north. Her name is Elin from Sweden, living in Pai. She gave me an update. The government officials had sent the army to the region, and had begun a massive cleanup operation. Elin had tried to get the numbers of dead and missing, she told me, but the district office was being tight-lipped and aggressive. A Thai friend told her the government might revoke her visa if she kept pushing.
"They're trying to cover it up." She said.
Where was the press? The five members of Human Translation scoured the news. If the tragedy was as bad as she had described, there was almost nothing reported. A theory was presented: Just nine months after the Tsunami, a hyper-sensitive Thai government, with a history of arrogant nationalism, banned international press in the region. Two massive calamities in one year, they thought, would doubly decimate an economy dependent on tourism. They said officially that the situation was entirely under control. Elin said people were dead and dying.
I decided the only way to find out was to see it myself. I hopped on a night-train northward, and have been here since. The truth, as it often ends up, is somewhere between the worst and best case scenarios. I found Pai, still there, but deeply changed.
It had been two years since my last visit here, and I had forgotten the mountains of the northwest. They are enormous jagged peaks, wrapped in thick jungles creeping into broad river valleys. Pai sits along two rivers in the center of one of these valleys, surrounded by rice paddies and quiet hills. The climate under these mountains generates enormous Olympian thunderheads that roll through the valley constantly. There are epic skies here, always.
This weather system created something unprecedented. In the middle of August there were thunderstorms throughout Thailand, Burma and Laos that brought massive monsoon rains. This, accelerated by Pai's unique climate and illegal logging in the mountains pulled a torrent of mud, trees, and water down from the hills the size of which had never been seen before.
Every wooden structure close to the river completely vanished. Every concrete building became an empty shell missing its walls. The river had widened its banks by a thousand feet at points, flipped trucks on their sides, pulled giant boulders miles down from the mountains.
Throughout this, I read the news, watching hurricane Katrina slowly mature and fly over Florida. I read again as it gathered strength and ripped into the gulf coast. I followed the story through the days I drove around the villages of Pai, staring at a war zone of mud, stone and fallen trees. I read about the slow deadly rise of the water in New Orleans, about the broad swath of shattered buildings and lives. These same days I met refugees who were left with nothing, also made homeless by water. As we coordinated help for them I thought about Katrina's victims living in America. I thought to myself "Thank god those people have infrastructure. Thank god those people have help waiting for them." Those I was meeting had nothing.
Then I read the news again, and suddenly irony was before me. There I was, on the exact opposite side of the world, staring at desperate pictures of people in my own country – a country which professes to be one of the most civilized, and best-equipped to take care of its own citizens, suffer through much of the same horror I saw before me in the middle of rice-paddies and jungle. The same inadequate government response to a disaster, leaving broken lives, privation, and shame.
I cannot make comparisons to the damage done - they are different catastrophes. Pai is small, and the Thai government does not recognize many of the victims here, as they are refugees from beyond the border of Laos and Burma. Myself and three other people are addressing this problem in Pai. I have helped them begin a project to sustainably assist the poorest people who have lost everything. They are on track for rebuilding houses, purchasing livestock, feeding people. These are small steps, but they are needed. I wish the invisible masses had news teams covering their calamity, but they have us. I believe it is enough.
If compassion was as indiscriminate as disasters, the world would be a different place. We do what we can, no matter where we are.
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