Five Years

Today I wanted to write about the 2004 tsunami...to remember...but I find that there aren't enough words right now. I spent my entire senior year of college trying to process it and put it in some kind of written form, and so now the idea of sitting down and writing something brief and pithy about the depth of grief and devastation that was brought about on December 26th five years ago is just overwhelming. There were so many stories. Even now, it's hard to know what to do with all the stories. I was only there for a week, six months after the tsunami, to help with relief work, but I heard enough stories to write a book. Stories of survival. Stories of grief. Stories of complete and abject loss. A few have especially stuck with me: the young boy who somehow managed to swim to safety but lost his entire family, the woman who had to be tied down at night to keep her from going down to the shore to look for her only daughter who had drowned in the waves, the music professor who thought that if he could only have a piano everything with be okay. I know that they haven't forgotten, so neither will I. I continue to pray for them and tell their stories, and it may not be much, but it's something.