On cyclones and politicization
Recently, quite by chance, and in that slightly spooky kind of way when you even think it may not be completely by chance, I happened upon this photo-journalism coverage at the New York Times.
It’s all about John Trotter, an American photographer who was attacked as he worked in Sacramento back in 1997, suffered major head injuries and loss of memory, and has spent half an adult lifetime recovering.
His work looks great, building on his experiences of the attack and the aftermath, but now years on seeking to grow beyond them.
I met John many years ago, and he helped me turn my life around.
I was running an emergency hospital on Kutub Dia, an island lying out in the Bay of Bengal, in the aftermath of the devastating 1991 cyclone.
A cholera-like E coli bug had struck because of the destroyed water supplies and sanitation, and our job was simply to pump as much IV fluid into people, usually children, to keep them alive till they stopped losing fluid at the other end. A bit of electrolyte balance based on educated guesswork, but pretty straightforward if you could first find a line into tiny dehydrated veins; that was the big challenge, and it was pretty exhausting.
It was also pretty exhilirating in a selfish kind of way – the US Navy helicopters (stopped over for a few days en route to Japan after the first Gulf War), the warlike conditions, all that kind of thing.
John arrived unannounced on a helicopter one day. He’d seen the news on TV, knew his dad had once worked on polio vaccines in Bangladesh, packed his cameras and set off from his home town of Sacramento, just feeling he had to pay witness.
That afternoon, a little girl was carried in by her dad. She was maybe 10. She was more or less dead, but we went to it with CPR and getting lines in and after about 15 minutes of thumping and breathing and poking, she spluttered, and she came back. Her dad carried her home the next day, alive.
John was there to record it, though I didn’t notice at the time. That night, a big storm – the ’second cyclone’ – came over, and we lay under tables on the first floor of what had been the island’s school and was now the hospital while it raged. It was strong, but it wasn’t as big as the first, and the tidal wave didn’t come. Next morning, John shook hands and jumped on a departing helicopter. I’ve never seen him again. No reason I should.
A few months later, John had the courtesy to send over the article he wrote for his newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, in which the centre coverage was how we’d got the little girl, whose name I’ve forgotten, back more or less from the dead.
Reading it, I realised that I was full of shit at times. Unlike John, I hadn’t really cared enough about the little girl, what had happened to her, and why it had happened, why there’d not been a cyclone shelter on an outlying island. I was turning into a hardened aid worker,who’d end up living in a big house in an impoverished capital city ordering people about and being gently or not so gently cynical about the work I did and the country I worked in.
I’m not saying John’s article changed everything, but I soon moved away from health work towards more general ‘community development’, ended up in Tanzania running forestry and agricultural stuff, before making the big split from the comfortable-amdist-the-misery overseas life in the late 1990s. I came back to England to start again.
I reckon John had something to do with that, and for better or for worse, I”m grateful. I’m glad he’s got his life back together, and that his photography is benefting others now, however subtly.
Why am I reminded of this now?
Well, partly it’s the old wander and excitement lust that courses through my veins every times there’s a big disaster, as in Haiti and now Chile. I even made initial enquiries about going to Haiti. I just couldn’t help myself, silly old sod that I am.
But more, and more tangentially perhaps, it’s this small rant by Dave and the comments that follow.
Politicization doesn’t happen just because we think it should. It happens because politically aware people create the impetus, in however small a way, for other people to take stock of who and where they are in the world.
Of course Dave knows that, but it’s important to keep remembering, whatever the frustrations.
I thought about going to Haiti too, actually, but obviously I don’t have quite so many relevant skills as you do to such a scene. I was thrown by this, because I’ve never regarded my connection the country to be special – and have never really felt this urge with any other natural disaster.
Strange.
On the point about political consciousness, you’re right, I do know that it doesn’t happen because we think it should. That’s not what was at issue in my rant; it’s that the author that inspired the rant clearly had a political consciousness, and works in a job that requires such a consciousness, but felt the need to drop in some stupid comment about how she didn’t really know much about politics.
Well, this is because she’d never bothered to find out. All the opportunities have been there – and she’s evidently a literary person. It’s just laziness that has stopped her – the very laziness which results in someone writing an article about a political issue without bothering to perhaps do some groundwork.
As for saying that she was unlikely to vote because someone might laugh at her tattoos, I think this demonstrates that most of the rhetoric in the article was designed to make her appear as one of the disenfranchised young – which she’s not. If you go out in public or go to school or go clubbing tattooed up, how stupid do you have to be not to want to vote on this basis?
My problem wasn’t the confused political consciousness – it’s the disingenuity, which is unrelated.