water everywhere

From birth on it seems like everything is about liquids - water, milk, and various other bodily fluids. It's something one has to get comfortable with. It's interesting that this intimately wet experience of mothering an infant has been happening concurrently with the flooding in Europe and New Orleans - Mother Nature's wetness on a grand scale.

For the first two weeks of baby's life I stayed away from TV. But recently I've let it creep into my life. Yesterday I watched a show on the flooding in New Orleans. I can't get the images out of my head. Abandoned pets, a family with nothing wondering the streets of an abandoned city aimlessly, water up to the rooftops, the sick being carried into a morgue to die because no one can help them, bloated dead bodies in the street and the water, dehydrated babies. Just too much.

I remember being in New York just a couple of weeks before September 11th. I went to a photo exhibit on refugees around the world. The photographs were stunning - wide eyed Afghani girls, make-shift tents blowing in the wind in the middle of the desert, barren landscapes, barbed wire. There was a section on Rwanda. Some of the images were too much to bear. Refugees walking single file past dead bodies floating in water. I wanted to turn away and leave, but suddenly realized that I have the priviledge to walk away that the refugees did not have. The least I can do is witness their life through these images. So I made myself stay and study each photograph slowly and carefully. Being a witness to someone's pain... what a prelude to September 11th. And it was like that yesterday when watching the show on the floods. This is the least I can do, I thought. But I felt traumatized just from watching TV. I can't imagine what it felt like living through it.