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GW community deals with the effects
Posted Thursday, January 20 2005 02:00:05 am
As news came yesterday that the death toll in the Dec. 26 tsunami in South Asia is continuing to rise and now reaches 212,000, and several student organizations banded together to raise aide money, some members of the GW community recalled their personal experiences with the natural disaster.
Alexandra Pasternak, a sophomore who has dual citizenship in the United States and Finland, was with her family on Dec. 26, celebrating their traditional holiday gathering in Finland. A few days later, after her father had seen reports on the Internet and the world began to realize the magnitude of the tsunami’s destruction, she began to realize what was going on.
In Finland, she and the rest of her comrades soon realized that Thailand was one of the areas that was worst hit. Thailand is also the most popular Christmas vacation destination for many Scandinavians. As body counts began to be reported, the Scandinavian countries’ death tolls became significant.
Pasternak soon found out that her family’s close friends had been in the area. A family of four that was close to the Pasternak’s family was vacationing in the area. The 13 year-old daughter survived, but lost her father, mother, and 18 year-old brother. Also missing were Pasternak’s father’s good friend of 30 years, whom she considered an uncle, who lived in Thailand. None of the bodies have been found.
“My mom said that one of the hardest parts was the hope you keep holding,” she said. “The friends that we lost, they’re not coming home, they’re unidentifiable. The chances that they survived are nonexistent. Around the first week of January we had to accept that they weren’t coming home.”
The Finnish government released a missing list on New Year’s Day, Pasternak said. “Everyone I know [was] scouring these lists because there’s always a chance you know someone, or you know someone who knows someone,” she said. “And half the people that are still missing aren’t even on it.”
The list, she said did not include those who were in hospitals and could not be accounted for and what are known as the Swedish Fins, who live in Finland but speak Swedish and travel with the help of Swedish agencies.
According to Pasternak, of all the Fins who have been reported missing, only one body has returned home.
In the United States, the State Department created a task force, which is created every time there is a major problem overseas in which Americans are involved. According to a mid-level State Department official who is involved in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the current total of Americans who are unaccounted for are 230. In total, 18 Americans are confirmed dead and 17 are missing and presumed dead.
This total is down from the initial missing count of 10,000, which was the number of reports submitted to the task force in the first week.
The task force was created immediately after the tsunami news broke on Dec. 26, said the official. The group worked 24 hours a day straight through last Friday, Jan. 14.
“We had… literally thousand of calls,” she said, from family members, friends, coworkers and sometimes Congressional offices. The calls were processed in a database, sorted by the missing person and each contact was listed under the missing person.
Following the creation of an account, the missing person would be tracked down through interviews via the embassies and posts set up throughout the region. “It takes a lot of tracking down,” she said.
Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs Janet Steele was in the region during the disaster, spending her vacation teaching narrative journalism at a school in Jakarta, Indonesia. On the morning of the earthquake, Steele stood on her balcony, ironically thinking about natural disasters. “I thought, ‘If there was an earthquake, what would I do?’” she said.
Steele realized that something was happening only later, when she saw reports on the Internet and began watching CNN, BBC and local Indonesian news. Due to the Christmas holiday, most Indonesians were on vacation, so Steele had little to do. Steele spent the majority of her time watching the media coverage and the Indonesian reaction to the tsunami.
“It just became really clear,” she said, “that we had no idea how many people really died because all these villages had been shut off.”
Pasternak was also consumed with watching the news everyday, trying to get some more information on the disaster. This was the general reaction of most Fins, she said. “There were days where you’d go out with friends or you’d go skiing or you’d go to a party, but it was always in the back of your mind.”
Steele said that though she was in one of the countries that was most affected and the one in which the earthquake began, she felt detached. “That was the odd thing, to be relatively close, but not affected,” she said. Sumatra, rebel-controlled Indonesian island in the province of Aceh where the epicenter of the earthquake resides, is about the same distance to Jakarta as Washington, D.C. is to Florida.
That weekend, a lot of tourists went to the beach but she decided to stay with her friends. “First of all, there was a feeling of absolute shock as it became clear how devastating this was, and then the feeling of helpless. ‘What can I do?’ I’m not a doctor.’”
Five days later, Steele received a call for volunteer translators on a news compilation website, called the Translation Project from an Indonesian group known as Pena. The website offered local news stories translated from Indonesian to English, providing English-speaking countries access to local stories. Having studied the language since her second visit to Indonesia between 1999 and 2000, Steele found translation as the perfect opportunity to do something.
“I thought, ‘well this is at least something I can do,’” she said. “It’s something little, but at least it’s a chance to sort of help get Indonesian and Acehenese journalists’ stories out.”
The translation project allowed Steele to provide some help to several of her colleagues and friends in the region. “I liked the fact that I was there [as an American] in a very small supporting role to the Indonesian journalists, who were sort of the stars… A tragedy like that is just so enormous that it’s so hard to even imagine.”
During her break, Pasternak said she felt helpless because she did not have enough money to donate significantly. So she turned her sorrow into activism, volunteering at the local Red Cross helping with fundraising efforts. “I just kind of walked in and said ‘I need to do something,’” she said, volunteering for three days.
Seeing the coverage from an Indonesian perspective was interesting, said Steele. “As an American, I felt pretty proud seeing those pictures of those helicopters bringing in stuff,” she said. “The American media was just obsessed with this idea, of the ‘good face of America in the majority-Muslim country.’” The Indonesians, however, were more concerned that the aide was coming in and did not really take much note of who was bringing it.
Steele eventually did teach her class, but the focus shifted onto tsunami coverage. “We actually talked a lot about [how] in some ways, the international reporting was better than the local reporting and they could recognize that. So, usually my goal is try to improve the quality of reporting and to get people to see news ways of thinking about doing reporting.”
“In some ways, I wasn’t any closer to it than you were,” said Steele. “The difference is that everyone I knew, knew someone [else] who was affected by it.”
The State Department official said the task force, which she joined and worked on New Year’s Day, will most likely close down tomorrow (Friday), but that the search for the remaining Americans will continue.
“The search does not stop,” she said. “It just means the number is low enough and manageable enough that people in the bureau, that the case workers can handle the number of cases.”
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