When the Cameras Leave, They Stay #298

I was with a friend early this month, and he showed me a video someone from his contact posted on WhatsApp status. Looking at this video, what I saw was a building in Caracas folding sideways like wet cardboard, dust rolling down a street like what I watched during the 9/11, except that this was an entire neighborhood with it. So sad.

Just thirty to forty seconds apart, two earthquakes happened, and by the time it was done and everything settled, thousands of lives in Venezuela had gone down with it, some of them their lives outright.

I got troubled and very disturbed, losing focus on the things I was doing at that moment. But what I kept on remembering was not the sinking and collapse itself, but because situations like that fade fast, people quickly move on from it to the next story like nothing has happened. But what I also kept remembering was a smaller detail buried in a later report, that those people who were trying to save lives pulled out a baby alive after three days under the rubble and collapse. Like three working days of searching for survivors by hand in places that all these heavy duty machines cannot be used by people whose names were never mentioned, or you and I can see their faces and will never even be recognized nor trend for their courageous act of service.

What I kept returning to was that anonymity. Because no one just did it through concrete, risking their lives for three good days and hoping to be forgotten with no interviews afterward. Where I come from, where if at all disaster response sometimes means committee and loudly announced funds that arrive quietly if at all, someone working purely because a stranger's kid might still be breathing underneath feels almost foreign, and deeply humbling.

So, if I have the power to do anything at all, my very first act won't be giving out a medal or making the headlines, because a lot of them might not be comfortable with it. But what I will definitely do is make sure that their organization is funded without any noise making and in a consistent way even after Venezuela stops making the headlines, because what I believe is that the unglamorous work of rebuilding always outlasts the attention span that followed the disaster itself.

The baby survived after three days under the concrete, and I am not sure if the people who found her will likely never be asked her name.

Thank you for reading.

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