After months of planning, my trip was just a day away.
The date? Sunday, Dec. 26, 2004. The destination? Thailand.
That morning, I woke up to the horrifying images on TV: hotels
being washed out to sea, cars riding waves into buildings.
All this was happening in Phuket, a city I was planning on
visiting only seven days later. Now, untold thousands were
dead.
Little did I know that across South Asia, those untold thousands
would soon top 200,000. Little had I anticipated that I would later
be visiting a region in the middle of an unprecedented humanitarian
crisis.
One month ago today, I completed a 26-hour, 8,500-mile journey
and arrived at Bangkok International Airport. Large television
monitors broadcast images similar to those I’d seen at home.
Outside, flags at half-mast dotted the smoggy skyline.
What struck me during my visit was that the disparities we see
in the United States are even more striking across the Pacific.
They are evident in the daily lives of working class Thai
families, who scrape by trying to make a living while
highrises and megamalls sprout up around them.
I’ve been to the Mall of America, but I’ve never seen
nicer malls than those in Thailand.
During my 10-day trip, locals continually groused over the
selfishness of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a
multibillionaire who refuses to donate even a penny to tsunami
relief in his own country and yet, on Dec. 30, was named
“Thai Man of the Year.”
At Thai gas stations, attendants give you two free bottles of
water just for getting gas, even if you don’t fill up your
whole tank. It was ironic to be receiving free water, when not 500
miles away thousands of fractured families were homeless without
anything to drink.
Ten days is insufficient time to truly experience any new
country, let alone a continent you haven’t visited since
infancy. It was enough, however, to give me the sense that ““
whether trapped by the tsunami’s devastation or by the burden
of harsh economic circumstances ““ life in a developing
country is fragile.
Furthermore, no lives are more fragile than those of the poor,
who by far have suffered the greatest toll in the tsunami’s
wake.
My original destination, a hotel in Phuket, was swept away in
the waves. My friend Avishek, a classmate in the School of Public
Health and my tour guide in Thailand, says “it just
wasn’t our time;” but it’s hard to say that it
was time for the 280,000 people who died on Dec. 26.
We have it so good here in California, yet we rarely realize it;
my experience in Bangkok showed me that Los Angeles actually
doesn’t have the worst traffic and pollution in the
world.
We are all fortunate to be alive, working and studying in a
place with so much opportunity. We can and should honor those who
are not so fortunate ““ by making concerted efforts, at home
and abroad, to reduce the disparities that trap them.
Lai is a graduate student at the UCLA School of Public
Health.