I write this with no proper thought in mind, and I promise no fluid flow of words for today’s entry.
I can’t explain the feeling, but there’s only one place I feel I should be right now…and that is Pakistan.
I can’t take it.
Reading on the developments of rescue and aid after Saturday’s earthquake-the worst natural disaster in Pakistan’s history-is more than I can bear.
Children injured, women and men alike crying, flattened homes, spreading diseases, the bitter cold of winter approaching, a hand poking out from under piles of rubble and debris…
Even on this side of the world, it’s too much. Even the final examinations seem to have taken a less important position. The best I can do, is to hope and pray.
But that isn’t enough for me.
Today, that feeling was at its peakest. I felt that if an aid worker were to come up to me and tell me to pack my bags immediately to become a volunteer in Pakistan, I would have done it without a second thought. Seriously.
I would have done it.
I wonder how they do it. Reporters like Shananaaz Habib, whom I believe has been in contact with the worst of human catastrophes…Iraq, Aceh, Tak Bai, and now Pakistan…how do they keep their sanity intact, and write what they see and hear? How are they able to depict human sufferings at its worst with such professionalism? It must be an uphill task to keep your emotions in check in a place where all emotions run wild and the first thing on everyone’s mind is to just survive.
From today’s Star paper:
ISLAMABAD: There was a distinct hush at the site of the collapsed Margalla Towers yesterday morning.
Newcomers to the location might have wondered about the need for stillness and why all the heavy machinery were lying idle.
Have the relief workers – who have toiled since Saturday’s earthquake – given up all hope?
On the contrary, the stillness was deliberate.
The search and rescue workers were listening intently for signs of life.
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1. A human rights activist. If people do not have access to their most fundamental and basic rights, how exactly do you expect this world to be civilised?
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3. My innermost ambition-a photojournalist. I’m not much of an emotional person (though previous entries may betray me and imply otherwise), and I don’t usually cry easily. Ask those closest to me; sometimes I wonder if I’m made of stone. But show me photos from the Iraq war, from forgotten Afghanistan, from the ongoing Palestine intifada, from the Asian Tsunami…to inspiring pictures and touching scenes, like a blind man’s first emotion when he is able to see, or children laughing and waving at the cameras with the ruins of their villages in the background, or women chatting happlly away as they go about their daily lives in their refugee camps…and it breaks me.
You will never know how much.
You know what’s sad? All that I want to be, requires human suffering to take place, with exceptions to No.3.
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I can’t win.
