A lighter note?

The tsunami was a serious event, where many people lost their lives, I don't mean to make light of it, but I have to tell a slightly strange story that happened in relation to it. For christmas (just before the tsunami) I was given a wasgij. A wasgij is a jigsaw puzzle except that the picture you make when you put the pieces together is a picture of what the people on the cover of the box can see (not an actual picture of the front of the box). So you don't know what the puzzle is of until after you have done it. I had started the jigsaw the day I got it, but when I got back to Australia after going to Indonesia, I completed the puzzle I had been given. It was a picture of a tsunami....

It was all a little odd.

Summarised

I can't paint a picture
I can't say the words
To tell you all that I have seen
To repeat all I have heard

An endless sea of destruction
Death that's all around
The struggle to keep living
When life's razed to the ground

And none of us can imagine
What they've all been through
And even those who were there
Can barely believe it's true

So many cannot eat now
And at night they lie awake
Shocked and scared by their loss
They tremble with every quake

11.1.05

Resilience

One of the most amazing things I saw was on my drive home from Banda Aceh. We were driving along and to our left there was all this mud, and you could see the ocean. There wasn't even rubble, I thought it must have all been rice fields or something like that. I asked one of our interpreters "What used to be here?" and he said "It all used to be houses". It seemed impossible to me that people's homes used to be there. Then I saw a man, on his own, standing poles up, like he was rebuilding his home. A home that had a view of the ocean. After everything they'd been through, only a short time ago, people were moving on and rebuilding their lives the best they could. I can have nothing but respect for these people. I think faced with the same thing, I would have collapsed in a heap at the almost impossible task in front of me. In my mind, that man has become a symbol of resilience, of what that really means. It's not just about survival, it's about rebuilding. Below is what I wrote in my notebook about that man.

Not even rubble
Ground completely razed
Lone man
Stands poles
To rebuild
Resilience