For some reason the titles never show up for the one set of emails that I send out (if anyone knows why please let me know) so I wanted to rewrite the title here. This is a very disturbing email and you may choose to not read it. I sat here for awhile debating about whether I should even send it because I am really wishing that I had never seen the pictures that I am about to write about, but I decided that my goal is to make people and their lives in other countries real to those around me so they will feel compelled to do something to help. I decided that this email may be the one that does that for some of you. I left out the graffic descriptions of the pictures both for you and also for myself because writing about them would involve picturing them again, which is something I never wish to do again
It's awful the things that you can buy here. Yesterday I was looking at a bunch of tsunami pictures. When I first got here I was upset that people were using the tsunami to make money. There is even a restaurant here called The Tsunami Restaurant. But sometime after I had that thought my opinion started to change. These people have lost everything and the tsunami is their reality. If it somehow helps them to deal with this or if it makes them some money in hard times like this then maybe I understand a little more. There are videos of the tsunami being sold all over the place and a few days ago I bought 2, but knew better than to watch them while I am here. The rest of the group watched them and said that they weren't full of bodies like I have heard that some of them are. I did not even feel tempted to watch them because I know that I would have trouble sleeping after watching the videos. Then yesterday I decided to buy a few of the pictures to bring home and show how powerful the tsunami was.
There are boards set up around with pictures that you can buy. The board I was looking at had some of pictures of the waves, some of the destroyed homes and cars, and a few of bodies in the distance. I avoided looking at the ones of the bodies and picked a few of the ones with the waves but no people in the waves (you can buy them with or without people in the process of dying, I chose without). I showed the salesman which ones I would like to buy and then he pulled out his bag of pictures and we started searching for the ones I picked out. Somehow it wasn't until I had looked through a handful that I realized what I was looking through. Apparently they had put the more "tourist friendly" pictures on the board and the pictures full of dead, bloated bodies of adults and children in the bag. I was horrified at what I was seeing. The Thai guy that was showing me the pictures turned to me with strange look on his face and asked me if I liked looking at these. I was crying by this time and told him not at all. He said he didn't either. He continued to flip through the pictures looking for the ones of the waves and I was too much in shock to ask him to stop. I saw things that went far beyond my imagination. There were close ups of people's faces after they had been in the water for quite some time. There were pictures of people being dragged out of the water. There were pictures of dead children lined up and people crying over them. There were coffins full of people with no lids on them so you could see right in. There were naked bodies lined up everywhere. By the time I was able to ask him to please stop I had 4 pictures picked out. One of a huge wave crashing against a tall tree, one of buildings that had been destroyed, one of a pile of cars, and one of the ocean full of rubbish. I was set to buy these and get out of there but took one more close look to make sure that I didn't have any pictures of bodies. When I took a closer look at the picture full of rubbish I realized that wasn't all I was looking at. The picture was taken from far away so it was hard to see at first, but on a closer look I realized that lying all over the rubbish were bodies. Lots of bodies. Probably hundreds of bodies. I apologized through my tears that I had made him look through those photos and told him that I would not be able to buy them. Then I went home and was sick
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