Mindnumbing numbers coming from SE Asia

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-20-2003
Mindnumbing numbers coming from SE Asia
18
Wed, 12-29-2004 - 8:50pm

I have to talk about this because it's so huge.






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iVillage Member
Registered: 09-02-2004
Wed, 12-29-2004 - 8:57pm

At first I thought I was broke, then I thought, I'm sitting in my cushy house, whining about being broke, and millions of people have lost everything.

I donated $50 to the Canadian Red Cross.





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iVillage Member
Registered: 10-27-2003
Wed, 12-29-2004 - 9:48pm

Good for you!

Those people are definitly in my prayers. This tragedy really puts things in perspective. I think I am bad off because I didn't get a white christmas, how shallow am I!

Paula

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-11-2004
Wed, 12-29-2004 - 11:14pm

i was just watching a special on it on ABC. it really is overwhelming, the actual event was horrendous enough, but it's mindblowing how difficult the aftermath is and is going to continue to be. there are still some places no one has been able to reach yet. it's incomprehensible. i was trying to picture how that many people can be dead so quickly. 100,000 people is like 20% of the entire population of DC.

i have to admit, part of what really gets me about this is that i can really identify with the horror of it. i know it's really terrible, but people always seem to be more affected by tragedy when it seems like something that they can imagine happening to them. i love beaches and wanted to go to phi phi someday (still do i guess?). i can totally picture what it must of been like being on the beach and how shocking it must be for this to happen so suddenly... then it was so random who lived and who died. families were sitting on the beach together and some lived and others were washed out to sea. children saw their parents swept away, and parents saw their children swept away. they showed video on ABC of people struggling to hold on to some rubble and some stayed on and others were pulled off. it was more horrifying than any horror movie.

someone said on a program i was watching about avalanches, that most humans see things in human terms, not on nature's terms. they look for meaning and reasons and a logical progression of events, and think there is a solution to every problem, but that's not how nature works, nature's terms are huge and random and everything can change in an instant and humans are an insignificant speck in the face of nature's power. this was certainly a demonstration of that on an enormous scale.

i hadn't written about it before, because i guess there isn't anything really to say about it, except it's really sad, and really horrifying, and really humbling.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-20-2003
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:05am

Good for you--especially coming off a vacation.






iVillage Member
Registered: 03-20-2003
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:08am

Definitely--things like this always make me realize how lucky we are.






iVillage Member
Registered: 11-15-2004
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:22am
Thank you for posting this Jean. I have had a very hard time watching the news.
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-20-2003
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:23am

I didn't say anything before either, other than in passing for the same reason. But, then I thought if I posted how we could help and if it spurred even one person to donate, then that's one more person who gets drinking water or food or more.






iVillage Member
Registered: 05-20-2004
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:29am

This affects my work since I am an editor for a travel health company... I was really stressed yesterday and working late to get all the health-related tsunami precautions into our product, when I realized that if the only after-effect of the tsunamis for me is that I have to work an extra 5 hours, I should consider myself extremely blessed. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to experience this sort of natural disaster. Even if you survive, then begins the process of finding out if your loved ones lived, and then rebuilding your life from square 1.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-11-2004
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:31am

i only watched about the first 15-20 minutes of the abc show. i thought it was pretty well done. they had footage i hadn't seen before, and first-hand accounts, both from westerners and from locals.


one thing that's come out of this, and it's pitiful, but true - i'm sure i'm not the only one who got a crash course education about what countries are where and which people live where in SE asia.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-11-2004
Thu, 12-30-2004 - 9:37am
one thing that i thought was really interesting, and really tragic, was that even without warnings, if people had even been educated about tsunamis, a lot of lives would have been saved. in at least some places, the water disappeared before the tsunami came in, and if people had known what that meant, they would have had time to run for higher ground. instead a lot of people walked down TOWARDS the receding water to check out what had happened. also, you could see in the video footage, that even when the waves started to come in, a lot of people just stood there looking at it or taking photos, whereas you could see that if they had run or climbed to higher floors they could have outrun the water.

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