Flashback: Tsunami

Just because it happened half a year ago is not a reason to forget. We need to remember. So when I came across something I wrote about it last January, I decided to go ahead and post it, with only slight modifications.

That MTV...

Intellectually, we all know what happened with the Tsunami: everything was destroyed, whole villages, towns, cities, families, everything. The coastline has been forever changed, the terrain is different. It's a different world there now. We all know that. But here's the part we don't think about:

Everything is gone.

I saw a special on MTV about the whole mess. (Yes, really. For those of you who are a bit, shall we say, "beyond the MTV generation," MTV has some excellent news specials. Yes, the VJs tend to be, well, odd. But a few of the news people are excellent.) A few international MTV folks went to the area in mid-January. They each went to a different country. The point was to see, post-Tsunami, what it's really like and how the people are doing. And whether all the money we've given is getting to them. There was a lot of tragedy. Devastation. Destruction. Death. Etc. And again, the reminder:

Everything is gone.

At one point, one of the MTV guys (I think it was Gideon Yago, one of the good ones) was in this huge... well, I guess it was a temporary orphanage. Or perhaps school? I'm not entirely sure. There were a ton of kids there (100? 200?) for an art class. Art therapy, really. Kids of all ages painting and coloring and drawing. It's one of the ways they were helping the kids to deal with the tragedy and begin to move on. But again:

Everything is gone.

Think about what that means. All the paperwork. Marriage licenses, birth certificates, everything. For the orphaned children who are too young to speak, they have no names. The names their parents gave them are lost. They'll never know what their parents named them. They'll never even know their parents' names. We take it so for granted. It's the little things that we forget. But at the same time...

Given the pictures of flowers the children were drawing and the bright colors they were using and their smiling faces and infectious laughter, the show was surprisingly uplifting. Everywhere these MTV people went, there were kids. And though we certainly saw clips of sad, blank children, it only took someone going over to them with a hug or a game or a smile to have them smiling and laughing, genuinely having fun. The adults they spoke to were just as amazing. So nice. So willing to share a part of themselves. As one of the MTV people put it, since it happened to so many, there's really no sense of "woe is me" with people. They're all in the same boat. It's amazing the way the human being bounces back. So in the end, I guess the lesson is this:

Everything is not gone. The human spirit remains. And that is more important than any piece of paper.