Walking through the rubble along the beach in tsunami ravaged Calang in Aceh brought back feelings I'd experienced when I was in Beirut during the civil war, in Cambodia as their war wound down and in Kobe after the earthquake. They were very different places at very different times, but seeing the suffering the people had endured gave me a profound sense of sadness that linked me to each place.
The morning as I walked from East Beirut into West Beirut there was a long line of decrepit vehicles packed with refugees and piled with all their belongings getting out of the war zone. Their faces were deeply etched with pain, sorrow, weariness and sometimes a vacant look that conveyed their despair more deeply than words could. The feeling intensified as I saw the destruction the war had on the city and as I heard the stories of the people who had endured and suffered and survived. Mixed with the feeling of sadness was a great sense of awe laced with fear. Awe that people would do this to one another, fear that this could happen to me and the people I love.
How did people cope with war? Often the best thing they could do was simply to talk about it.In Cambodia, added to these feelings was anger. Anger that Pol Pot and his followers could so coldly murder their fellow countrymen for no more reason than a dubious deranged philosophy. Standing in the rooms where people had been tortured, seeing the small cells where they had been confined, knowing of the mass graves they had been buried in was chilling and bewildering and to this day whenever I think of it, my anger returns.
Kobe brought another dimension. Living in Tokyo I had watched on live TV sections of the city burning after the quake had devastated the city. The death toll was rising and the evidence of how helpless people can be in the face of nature was compiling. When I arrived in the city one of the first things that hit me was the chaos -- how difficult it was to get from place to place, how, even in Japan, some rules of order had fallen apart. But the Japanese quickly organised relief for those who needed it
I was also impressed by the people and how they talked about what they had endured. They told me that nights after the earthquake they camped out in the parks as they were afraid of aftershocks. They stayed awake late talking about events, and talking about friends and family who had been killed. Once again it was the opportunity to share with others the pain they were feeling that helped them through the worst. In every place I've been, there are images that stand out. In Kobe it was in that section of the city where the homes had been turned to ash. It was completely flat. Throughout the city, buildings had been destroyed by the quake and belongings strewn in the street and as sad as that was it paled in comparison to the destruction of the fires. In an area where the ground was black ash, people, on their hands and knees, sifted through it with their fingers, hoping to find anything that might have survived. A gold chain, some earrings -- anything. Gone were all the family photos, the letters, the mementos of a lifetime.
In Calang it was worse. When I stepped out of that helicopter and saw the long beach where there was just rubble I realized that it was entire families, and generations of families, that had been lost. Their energy, their love, their relationships were gone. Nothing could be clawed out of the rubble. In Banda Aceh there were images like those I had seen in the war zones I had visited. There was a car that looked as if it had exploded -- blackened and in two crumpled pieces -- it could have come from Beirut but it hadn't, it had been hit by the tsunami -- such is the power of nature.
As language was a barrier I couldn't talk very much with the people in Aceh, but they were very friendly and seemed very happy. But we don't always know what is going on beneath the surface and I am sure with the tsunami victims, there is a great deal. Because of their appearance of happiness I was quite surprised when Ir Zulfian Ahmad, Bupati of Aceh Jaya said of the people, "After a year, they are a little bit better." There are some things that you never get over and there are experiences that change you forever.