Hope Crushed Beneath a Boat

(Now that I’m safely home and gearing up for a Christmas and family mode, this and the next blog entry are reflective of this awe-inspiring expedition to Asia.)

Even though I, like many others, was glued to CNN’s tsunami coverage in December 2004 and even though I’d heard from colleagues their vivid reports of the devastation, the scope of that disaster escaped me until it was most graphically driven home by this surreal thing I saw on Wednesday, December 12, 2007. The wave reduced a huge, 3600 ton ship to the equivalent of a child’s toy. Think of the weight of 1800 automobiles, like the one in the embedded photo of Dr. Lisa Bonds posing diminutively beside that boat in Banda Aceh. This floating power station was carried on a killing path 3 kilometers in-land. Entombed beneath this massive steel vessel are people; their homes and their earthly hopes crushed forever.

That’s why it’s so important for us to continue to build the infrastructure of Indonesia, because, frankly, I worry about another earthquake that could induce another tsunami. I really want the people I saw and spoke with, especially the children, to be better prepared than they were the last time. “Geography has dealt Indonesia a wild card: Nowhere else do so many live so close to so many active volcanoes,” (Andrew Marshall, “The Gods Must Be Restless” in National Geographic, January 2008: 49).