Online News From The Tribeca Trib

'Such Immense Grief'

By Kate Moxham as told to April Koral

A few days after the tsunami I began having dreams about it, feeling stressed. I felt the need to go help and taking pictures was all I was qualified to do.

I called up AmeriCare, which brings medical supplies to disaster areas. I had photographed their activities and donated the images to them before.

A week later I landed in Banda Acheh, Indonesia, on a Russian cargo plane chartered out of Singapore. The airport was chaos. Thousands of foreigners had descended on this place in days. Everyone was trying to get transportation, drivers, vehicles, translators. Hundreds of people were living in tents in the airport parking lot.

I was looking for a driver to take me to the most devastated areas. I found Naseer. He was a literature professor at a college in Banda Acheh and getting his PhD in women's studies. He was sweet and brilliant. His uncle had died in the tsunami. He said to me, "We only lost one," as if it were negligible. So many other people lost more.

Although it was two weeks after the tsunami, there were still bodies all over the place. Every day you saw trucks with

corpses piled high heading for mass graves. Although, the smell of rotting bodies had subsided, you could still smell it in some places. Rows of body bags were lined up on every forth or fifth block. Teen-age youth groups had been organized to help the military pick them up. Some corpses were in bags, others were not. People would open body bags looking for family members or people from their village. If they knew someone, they took the body.

No one paid attention to the bodies. People are going about their lives, going to the mosques, to the bank. They had to keep living in the middle of the clean-up. One day, I was on a busy street in a business district and there were a couple of corpses in the median and cars were just going by.

I know a few war photographers and there's something called "compassion fatigue." I kept asking myself, "Am I shutting down?" I tried to imagine if I had lost 15 people of my family.

I started feeling guilty in front of Naseer and apologizing to him. I'd keep saying to him, "Can you pull over so I can take a picture," and usually it was a scene of immense grief and suffering and devastation. This was his hometown and I felt like a bit of a vulture, a voyeur. I felt a little ashamed as if my profession was about looking over and over again.

When I came home, I had a kind of spiritual crisis, an overwhelming sense of futility and meaningless-a sense that we were all rushing nowhere.

Some friends said, "I hope you don't mind if I don't look at your pictures. It's too much. I've seen so many." I don't blame them. People feel helpless. After the first few days I never looked at them again. I felt they were unsuccessful in capturing the story.

Everywhere I went in Banda Acheh, people wanted to talk to me, and if I stayed more than five minutes, they'd begin to cry. One man draped himself around me and cried and cried. Their personal loss needed to be witnessed and their individual grief validated by another person. They needed to say "this is what happened to me" and have someone listen. Maybe this was the one thing that I did and maybe that was enough.

Freelance photographer Kate Moxham lives on Leonard Street. Her photos are part of a show and auction at ABC No Rio benefiting rebuilding efforts. Go to architectureforhumanity.org.