The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart...
- Henry Wadworth Longfellow, Holidays
So begins one of the chapters of Petra Nemcova's memoir, Love Always Petra: A Story of Courage and the Discovery of Life's Hidden Gifts. Supermodel Petra was vacationing with her boyfriend Simon Atlee on Khao Lak, Thailand when the tsunami hit.
I love the fourth line of this very same Wadsworth poem too.
"When the full river of feeling overflows;—"
We can't feel for statistics: 50,000 this, 370,000 that is meaningful to robots, but it doesn't register for humans.
"Somehow, people just seem to accept that Africans are starving or getting killed. It's no big deal," commented Dr. Kees Rietvald, a veteran humanitarian health worker. "But when you have blond Swedish children or a Czech fashion model swept away by some tidal wave, that's a totally different matter." - "When the World Forgets Who Comes to Help," National Geographic, December 2005
That's one embittered takeaway. But I think it's a matter of story...how many personal individual stories of Africans do you know?...and direct participation.
We need real human faces. A story needs a protaganist we can identify with.
When Kiva announced their site would link up microloaners like you and I to specific Ugandans (not vague mass of humanity) needing a little seed money for their goat or cellphone, all the entrepreneurs were matched up one to one with willing loaners the first day. There's Africans with names there, like Were Kinindi living in actual place names like Tororo.
It just turns out Petra's story is remarkable. This is a wonderful interview with Petra Nemcova ("Petra's Story", Vanity Fair, May 2005) I read back when it first came out in print. Petra grew up in a small mining town in the Czech Republic where winter shoes were scarce. She says: "We had enough for food, but not for special things like fruit. This taught me how to appreciate things." Three snippets:
[On her rescue from the palm tree - her pelvis was broken in four places and she could not walk:] "All of them were risking their lives—they could be swept away; something could fall on them. But everyone forget themselves for others. It was so amazing to see all these people doing incredible things. It was so beautiful."
"Tragedy gives us the opportunity to put meaning into our lives," she says. "It changes our values, gives us the opportunity to think where we want to go. I lost the person closest to me [her boyfriend vanished and his body was found 69 days later], but I got a second chance to live. I feel like I'm living for both of us now. I feel not just a responsibility to do it as he would have, but also to help other people.
[My favorite passage I've already referenced but you get it again:] As we talk, Nemcova has been fingering her necklace, a chain of carved ivory and black wooden beads with a silver pendant encasing a small Buddha. "I was in the hospital lying next to a Thai man, and he gave me this necklace," she says. "It was probably the last thing he had, which he gave to a stranger. He said, 'It will protect you.' I never saw him again."
p.s. I need a digital camera and MP3 recorder. Anyone have connections to the vendors of these (discount, sponsorship)? Cold calling isn't working.
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