l-r Aiya, me and Gunther
I was digitizing a whole bunch of pictures last weekend. They were all really old school, from 1988 and earlier. Our entire life before we came to Canada pretty much. Most of the photographs are getting fuzzy and faded especially the colour ones from the 70s, but you know the old cliche "a picture is worth a thousand words." Most of them are really goofy, you know the usual collection of family photographs, nothing really profound exactly like our lives. As I was going through them though, I was struck by the above photo. Ammi had just gone to L.A. or to London (i don't remember which) and she was gone for about a month, so she and Thathi decided that we would go down south to a resort for a couple of days to spend some time together as a family. Aiya of course made fast friends with another little boy whom he spent most of our vacation with. His name was Gunther and he was visiting from Germany, he didn't speak any English and aiya didn't speak any German. They were pretty much insperable. Whenever Gunther's mom wanted to find him, she'd come to ammi and ask in broken English where he was, and Ammi did the same thing when she was looking for aiya. (Except not in broken English. I hope so at least.)
Even though this picture was taken almost 20 years ago, I couldn't but help thinking about the tsunami. It didn't take pictures of orphans in the newspapers, or black and bloated dead bodies on the internet for the gravity of the situation to hit me at a personal level. It was the picture of the three of us innocently smiling that did it for me. I wonder how many other little Gunthers and Erajs had become fast friends during an idyllic trip to the beaches of the south. It makes me go cold thinking about it. Not to be dramatic or anything, but that's what sealed the deal for me.
Speaking of tsunamis though, I think the current death toll is at 220,000. It's mind boggling to know that a lot of those deaths could have been prevented if there was a proper tsunami warning system in place. The amount of money that ordinary people are pouring out for relief is incredible too. I witnessed it first hand myself when i was taking phone pledges at the Canada for Asia benefit concert. There are some incredibly generous individuals out there. I was watching a documentary on the genocide in Sudan last nigt on the CBC called Living with Refugees. It was incredibly thought provoking. 300,000 people have died so far in the genocide there, and there are a further 2 million refugees. (That count doesn't include the amount of internally displaced people.) Here is another 'disaster' that could be averted. It's not as if people don't care, they do care, but it's difficult to get the attention of the neccessary people in government. Because really who are we kidding? Why should any of the Western nations help those in the Darfur region? There's absolutely no political gain to be had. Canada is more than willing to help with the tsunami relief efforts though. But only in Sri Lanka, even though Indonesia was the hardest hit area. Gee. I wonder why that would be. It probably has nothing to do with the huge Sri Lankan immigrant population in some of the key cities across Canada. I wonder how many votes the Liberals would be able to extract out of the Sudanese-Canadians?
*climbing off soapbox*
