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Published: March 3rd 2006
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Evacuaction Route
Towards Uphill... Since I’ve been traveling with Royal, we’ve had many conversations about perspective, but perspective as it mainly pertains towards our individual view points and how each of us is continually developing different aspects of the world we are seeing into distinctly individual observations. I’ve been attempting to view the world through the eyes of others, but as I must admit, I had thought I was failing in my efforts to do just so. The idea of writing down what I am seeing and leaving my observations open to interpretation by whomever has been reading my work has not only helped changed my perception of the world I see, but in my opinion, has helped enhance it. I look at an amazing sunset, and my collegiate education invokes words of description pertaining to feelings of emotion rather than the observation of the presence of multiple molecular formulations that currently combining together to create the colors contained within clouds. I haggle with a street vendor over the price of a piece of art and see the desperation in their eyes over the potential of another lost sale due to poor communication skills on both our part rather than their to need to
keep their merchandise selling at a rate that allows them the opportunity to purchase more products in quantities of bulk price, allowing for the maximization of cost efficiency.
After traversing the newly rebuilt little town at the center of Ko Phi Phi, I headed towards the beach without really thinking just how much of this town appeared to be new. It seems that no matter where I go, I tend to skip straight through town to get my first views of what always feels like new beaches I’m discovering. I’m one of those guys you see at the beach that really doesn’t take too much time to prepare a spot on the sand because I usually drop anything I’m carrying, run towards the water and attempt a flip when I feel that I have enough of an aquatic cushion beneath me.
Before this trip, I can’t really give you a description of what the tides may have meant to me because to be honest, I can’t ever recall having been forced to look at the changing of the tides more than the disappointment I would feel if the water might hit me while I’ve fallen asleep on the
sand. But as I lay in the water practicing some new buoyancy techniques learned in scuba class, I must have closed my eyes or fallen asleep because I woke came to laying on the beach. Imagine my bewilderment when the last thing I remembered, I was floating in water and now I’m on solid ground, soaking wet. The tide had moved out to sea so fast that I hadn’t even noticed. My new found respect for tidal movement forced me to think like a scientist for a moment when it finally hit me that this entire island had been crushed by water that moved ten thousand times faster than the tide beneath me and had caught many more people by surprise than just me. As it turns out, the result of my realizations left me restless to return to the spots on the island that I had seen but not appreciated. I was unable to sit and enjoy the immense beauty of covered inlet before my eyes and the beautiful creatures confined inside and instead went to see what I had heard so much about but had neglected to absorb.
The island of Koh Phi Phi is a place
that has been affected so much by the movement of the water enclosing it that it shames me to admit that my description above is what allowed the effects of the Tsunami to truly resonate within my simple experiences. When I write that word, Tsunami, it used to invoke little more than the newspaper headlines I’ve read, the pictures I’ve seen and deep feelings of sympathy I felt at the time for the millions of unknown individuals that were punished because of their regional affiliation. Even having walked through most of Koh Phi Phi Don and seeing the lingering effects, fifteen months afterwards that devastated so much of what life was like on this island, I didn’t immediately comprehend that it was all the cause of water.
Looking up at the trees that line the beach, there are a noticeable number that contain no palm leaves, no coconuts, and no real indication that they are really even palm trees aside from their trunks. I don’t know if the water rose so high that it was actual current that took the tops of these trees away or whether it was the floating debris that carried the essence of these trees
out into the sea, but the power of water is truly an amazing thing.
As I passed the street vendor who sold me my new necklace earlier that day on my way to the beach, I paid him the remainder of his initial asking price before I negotiated a price better for me and noticed the sign beneath his table that I hadn’t seen earlier. “Please buy something. There is no money for me to buy more goods and no more goods to be made. I sell you what I have so that I can feed my family. I had five children but now I have three and we all need to eat. Please pay what you can and I will accept what you pay. We have nothing.”
Now I hate to add this last quote because I could never makeup something that desperate. There was a series of events that took me from the tropical island I was visiting as a tourist to the sign I’ve just repeated for you that allowed for the graduated severity of the Tsunami to hit home inside my own mind. Whether you’ve looked at an empty beer donated all the clothes
in their closet or read a book and volunteered your time, there are so many small aspects in life that we take for granted as simple pleasures or mundane annoyances, but by simply altering our perception, we are blessed with the knowledge that these simple elements in this world that are beyond our control may be stepping stones to realize that we can always help those in need. Whether it is a few hundred baht or the devotion of time, there are people all over this world who are desperately in need of charity that the manner in which you find them really doesn’t matter so long as you are willing to help. This trip is volunteer prohibitive because we are moving so fast in order to see all we can in the time we have.
Maybe an extra few hundred baht helped that vendor through the day but maybe someone reading this will be able to do more than I was.
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