EPT
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I was nineteen when I started at the newspaper. I’m young, fresh out of high school, and having recently watched All the President’s Men, believe that I have the power to single-handedly change the world. When you’re like that and you get into journalism, they work you to the bone. I went through long hours, with low pay and zero benefits. I did it for the kicks – for the paper, for the story and for the frontpage byline.
We would head out of the office in the early evenings, our stories filed, our ink stained hands cramped from typing. Taking the dark stairwell at the back, we would descend three floors into the chugging sound of the presses, the hiss-hiss of the collating machines and the slow murmur of the conveyor belts as they manufactured tomorrow’s news.
We’d saunter out the front gate, exchanging niceties with the drivers on duty that night as they stood next to the big news lorries, ready to take our words to breakfast tables in the hills. Then, as the night bore down on us, we’d sit in the smog outside a backstreet eatery and have plain tea, watch the street lights come on, get calls from friends who were going out partying and turn them down as we waited to go back in to make the final edits. We liked to think we were better than them. Doing something for a reason. A cause.
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I am an islander. The sea is my home.
I’m four years old and I’m standing waist deep in the shallow surf. I can see my dad, just a stone’s throw away, his head bobbing happily in the waves. I had been told that I could only wade in as far as my waist, and I was angry. I wanted the big waves. I wanted the sea.
I’m thirteen years old and I’m standing over my laundry bin, desperately trying to dust the sea sand out of my sports clothes. I know my mom would kill me if she found out that I had gone swimming near my school. A childhood friend of hers had drowned there. Every few months someone else did.
The very next week however, as I peeled off my morning fitness shirt and ran for the water, her threats were the last thing on my mind. The warmth of the surf and the gentle tugging of the water at my feet was all that mattered. Despite all her fears, I knew that the sea there wouldn’t kill me. I grew up on that stretch of coast. I went to school by it. I did my sports by it. Those waters ran in my veins.
When tragedy struck on 26th December however, I was as far away from that beach as I could be. It was my off-day and I had just woken up. The national broadcast channel first put the death toll at one hundred and fifty. They weren’t even calling it a tsunami then. The Prime Minister addressed the nation, asking us not to panic. A fellow reporter and close friend from the coast called to say he was alright. I didn’t think much of it.
It was evening when my News Editor called me. I was to head down south the next day. Two major cities to cover. A time, a place, a story. I had done this before, and as I sat there the opening began to form in my head, tight, compact sentences rolling out cleanly from the months of editing I had gone through. It would be good, this story. It would be great. My Editor would love it.
As I went to sleep that night, I was unprepared. Still young. Still in love with the sea.
Arriving at our destination, I remember walking over the destroyed playground towards the beach. I took everything in – a thirty foot bus squashed up against a building, walls shattered and tossed about, sea sand everywhere. Then as I watched, two men ran up from the beach, carrying the body of a little boy between them. A group of people crowded around to see if it was someone known to them, each with a little hope in their eyes. Hoping, not for a person but for a body. That it would be one of theirs, that it would not be lost. That it could be buried.
The voice of my photographer jolts me, bringing me back to the task at hand. He wants me to ask the crowd to move away from the boy so he can take a picture. I clear my head. I’m here to write, to report. The shots go off - snap, snap, snap – the sound of his DSLR shutter like gunfire in the sea breeze. Like he just killed the kid.
The boy is now alone, his body bloated from the water, a white gash in his skull staring up at the blazing sun. We leave him on the surf, our footprints leading away to more like him. Thirty thousand more.
I turn and look at the now calm water, and for the first time I fear it. Hate it.
For the rest of the day we go through through village after village, interviewing people, taking pictures. Nobody has anything to say. At a town cemetary I remember standing next to the mass graves, notebook in pocket, as body after body was put in. One slips from a grasp and I grab a limb and feel ankle, flesh, skin pass through my fingers. I hold. I lift. I place. I cannot remember the face.
I remember the smell though, crawling up my nose and sitting there for months after, taunting me with the memory of a hundred blackened bodies tumbling off the back of a tractor, scrambling to get into the freshly cut earth. Pieces of meat looking for respite.
Hundreds of them on the sides of the road, full of sea water, brimming with sand, bursting at the seams with stories to tell of how the water had come, and come, and come, and come, and come. How it had never stopped, taking house, market, train, electricity pylon, communications tower, mother, father, daughter, son, brother, sister – everything. Only the sand remained.
I remember the sounds of relatives wailing amidst the ongoing litany of religious rites.
I remember the blank looks, the long stares, the incomprehension.
I remember not knowing what to write.
I remember squatting on the driveway in front of the cathedral and listening to the sea bellow, just a few hundred meters away. There, on the twenty seventh night, in the midst of seven hundred displaced people, I prayed for hope.
I prayed that God would keep the sea away from us.
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Three months later, I was accepted to university. I never worked at a newspaper again, and probably never will. It’s not that I don’t think journalism is important – I do think that good writing can bring about change and that is why I’ve made it my business to learn how to teach it. I guess it’s just that the tsunami changed how I view the world. The sea taught me that the most valuable thing this world has to offer is people, and since then my life has been more about relating to them.
Oh, and the sea?
Let's just say I've learned to forgive.
