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There is Nothing Amusing About This
Rich Galen Wednesday January 12, 2005
From the village of Thazhamguda Kuppam, India
150 Kilometers south of Chernai (Madras)
Thazhamguda Kuppam is a five-hour drive from Chennai which used to be known as Madras on India's Southeastern coast.
According to the "Lonely Planet Guide" this section of India has been the least affected by modernity. Culture evolves slowly here. Human activity here might have begun as early as 300,000 years ago. The sea has provided the bulk of the protein for as long as anyone can remember. For as long as there has been anyone to remember.
A few weeks ago the sea turned on the 585 village families of Thazhamguda Kuppam and came roaring in with a series of waves which reached the tops of the palm trees along the shoreline.
There is nothing amusing about this.
The best houses - those which fronted on the sea - are completely gone. The row behind them is piles of bricks and sticks. The row behind that is standing but seriously damaged. Some 200 meters from the beach the force of the tidal waves were so strong that they knocked over the stone bannister on the seaward side of a house.
Tsunami damage is highly localized; more like a tornado than a hurricane. If the water came 200 meters up the beach and your house was 205 meters from the beach, it is absolutely undamaged.
But when you multiply the three miles of beachfront of this village by the tens of thousands of coastline which was affected throughout the Indian Ocean basin you end up with the numbers of victims which have been reported.
The people gather when foreigners show up. The children, being children, want their pictures taken and if you have a digital camera they are thrilled to see it right away.
Others are in shock. A man sits on the wreckage of what was his house between his son and his wife who - from exhaustion or grief or both - cannot bear to watch the Americans trudging through her village and lays her head on the bricks.
Forty of their kinsmen were killed. Some washed away. Some drowned. Some trampled by the wreckage of Thazhamguda Kuppam, the very place which has provided them protection for millennia.
There is a strong sense of not wanting to treat these people like actors in an exhibit. We will get back on an air-conditioned bus. They will stay, surrounded by the piles of debris which are now the measure of their lives.
There is nothing amusing about this.
We next drove to the a center which was trying to sort out children who may have been orphaned, parents who lost children in the tsunami, and families whose houses were destroyed but otherwise are whole.
To show the depth of the problem, Dr. Paul called up to the stage the dozen-or-so women who had attended and had lost at least one child.
As Dr. Paul consoled them with prayer, you could hear the sobs of unbridled grief - even without a microphone.
The orphaned children had their turn on the stage, comforted by the first glimmer of hope since the waves crashed over their lives. They would not be sold, enslaved, forced into prostitution, or murdered.
We have been focused on the number of deaths involved in the tsunami. If we add the number of people who were injured, uprooted, seen their boat - their livelihood - be smashed into toothpicks against a palm tree and all their relatives, the number of people seriously affected is in the millions.
We may have only helped a handful; but that's more than would have been helped had we not come. And when you multiply our group by the hundreds or thousands of groups who are in the region offering aid you begin to have some hope.
Nevertheless, there is nothing at all amusing about this.
Keep in mind, the Mullings subscription page has been turned over to taking donations for Charity City. Please click on this link if you would like to help.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A collection of Mullfotos from our day in the village.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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