Ordinary Gweilo

I suppose that, if we’re honest, many natural disasters are easy to ignore because we have no real way to relate to what happened.  Somewhere a long way away, thousands of people we don’t know have been killed and a foreign country has been badly affected.

For me, Sunday’s earthquake off the coast of Indonesia and the devastation it caused in a large part of Asia certainly had a much greater impact.

Mainly because I have visited several of the countries that were affected and I know people who live there.  I’ve been to places such as Penang and Phuket where many people died.  It is entirely possible that I could have been in one of those places on Sunday, rather than safe at home in Hong Kong.

One report yesterday said that the Laguna Phuket resort had been totally destroyed. Having stayed there not that long ago (and having considered going back there this Chritsmas) this certainly made it very real.  Fortunately it seems that this particular resort was not badly affected – only one person is missing and all the hotels are operating normally. 

However, other resorts on Phuket were very badly affected, and it’s not hard to imagine the devastating impact any number of seafront hotels might have suffered from the tidal waves.  One tourist is quoted as saying he only survived "because he had left the ground floor dining room of his hotel after breakfast to pack".  I’d be much more likely to be eating breakfast at that time in the morning rather than sitting by the pool or on the beach, but that might not have made any difference.

And yet… we have to remember that this is not just about foreign tourists.  It’s about the local people who worked in the hotels, and about people going about their ordinary everday business in Sri Lanka or Indonesia or India.  Entire communities wiped out, and probably considerably more than the current estimate of 20,000 dead.  Scary stuff.  Never underestimate Mother Nature.