I read this earlier and I can’t get it out of my head. The linked story is about the baby boom caused by those trying to replace entire families killed by last years Asian tsunami.
For some reason I found this particularly heartrending, from a 23 year old woman who married a virtual stranger after losing her entire family:
“I’m the only person to survive, so I’m all alone,†she says softly, sitting on a straw mat in the stuffy tent with a zipper door. “If I have a baby, I will have a friend.â€
I am typically calloused to the pain and suffering of others…
This touched me very deeply. It is truly a sad state of affairs.
Family, friendship… how much they mean to us!
That was a great post. It just goes to show how much people need each other. Love is a very important thing and that’s easy to forget when you live in a rich techno society.
It’s strange how this particular disaster is especially haunting to me. While some people aren’t as moved by a catastrophe when it happens to foreigners very different from themselves, perhaps that very unfamiliarity is what makes it so moving to me. I’m sure if I was there face to face with them I wouldn’t understand a single word they say. But there’s an irreducibility to suffering of that magnitude, some commonality in the face of nature’s fury. I see the pictures, and I look at their faces, and I see…myself, I guess.
I think how isolated I sometimes am, and how much I depend upon my own family. If you take away my brother and sister and my parents, I’d be almost that alone myself. How strange to wake up in “paradise” one morning only to have paradise bite back and take everything you have.
Terrible events like this drive home the point that all humans are essentially the same in our suffering, despite the superficial differences. It’s demoralizing to think of how much misery there still is there. Especially the loneliness- that’s got to be even worse than the grief.