Home at last with a good connection, I can finally start posting pictures again.
A few weeks back I wrote about a mother we met on the beach selling fruit who it turned out was bereaved of her son last year.
Here she is, hacking open a coconut. The wicker basket on the right was filled with coconuts, pineapples, bananas, mangoes, even some bottles of water. She arrived with it on her head, as you can see in the picture below left
And here she is poised to pick up the basket again.
I live here in the comfortable West. We have the blessing of a social welfare system, of medical care when we need it, of support groups and internet forums. We have a lot of blessings that I hope never to take for granted.
Meeting this bereaved mother brought home another lesson:
Sometimes people on the "other side of the world" don't seem quite real. We read news and statistics, "50000 die in 2010 Russian heatwave", "every day throughout the world 40,000 children die from hunger-related causes", "300,000 killed by tsunami." It seems so far away, the numbers so vast. And then there are the man-made tragedies, "5 Afghan children among 10 civilians killed in drone attack."
Do we really think that these unknown, unnamed people feel less pain than we do? That they value their lives a little less? That the survivors are less traumatised by their loss? The the mothers of those children are suffering any less than we are?
I think the 37-year-old fruit seller on Anjuna beach is a reminder of our common humanity, our common pain, our common tears. She was reacting as I have done, as so many other bereaved parents that I know personally have done. Her background, religion, circumstances, lifestyle, were utterly removed from our comfortable British life. But her pain at the loss of her son was identical.
We are all God's children.
A few weeks back I wrote about a mother we met on the beach selling fruit who it turned out was bereaved of her son last year.
Here she is, hacking open a coconut. The wicker basket on the right was filled with coconuts, pineapples, bananas, mangoes, even some bottles of water. She arrived with it on her head, as you can see in the picture below left
And here she is poised to pick up the basket again.
I live here in the comfortable West. We have the blessing of a social welfare system, of medical care when we need it, of support groups and internet forums. We have a lot of blessings that I hope never to take for granted.
Meeting this bereaved mother brought home another lesson:
Sometimes people on the "other side of the world" don't seem quite real. We read news and statistics, "50000 die in 2010 Russian heatwave", "every day throughout the world 40,000 children die from hunger-related causes", "300,000 killed by tsunami." It seems so far away, the numbers so vast. And then there are the man-made tragedies, "5 Afghan children among 10 civilians killed in drone attack."
Do we really think that these unknown, unnamed people feel less pain than we do? That they value their lives a little less? That the survivors are less traumatised by their loss? The the mothers of those children are suffering any less than we are?
I think the 37-year-old fruit seller on Anjuna beach is a reminder of our common humanity, our common pain, our common tears. She was reacting as I have done, as so many other bereaved parents that I know personally have done. Her background, religion, circumstances, lifestyle, were utterly removed from our comfortable British life. But her pain at the loss of her son was identical.
We are all God's children.
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