(Dobbs) Somewhere Down There Was A Woman Named Lisa
The tragic mix of love and grief are the same the world over.
A thousand deaths in Afghanistan. That’s half the number of American deaths from hostile action in 20 years of war there. But this, just two days ago, was an earthquake. A thousand Afghans wiped out in a single savage shake of the earth.
I should say at least a thousand. In the major earthquakes I covered over the years— in impoverished parts of Turkey, Yemen, Iran, the Apennine Mountains of southern Italy— conditions are so crude, equipment is so scarce, roads are so impassable, rescuers are so isolated, they don’t really know the death toll for days. And sometimes longer. And sometimes, never.
But there always are two realities. First: as one day dawns upon the last, the number of counted dead inevitably grows. And second: we might have different religions, different cultures, different histories, different politics, but the tragic mix of love and grief are the same the world over.
I thought of that today as I watched a video of rescue efforts at the Afghan earthquake.
Men were digging through rubble with their bare hands. Others were digging mass graves for corpses already lifted from the ruins, with more sure to come.
People were wandering amid the wreckage of their houses, everything they once possessed buried or smashed, any vision of the future splintered like the homes they’d lost.
It reminded me of Yemen, where the death toll ended in the thousands. The epicenter of the earthquake there was more than a hundred miles south of the biggest city, Sana’a. Not easy to reach the catastrophe in a country that at the time had no paved roads outside the capital, and not easy to treat the injured when there were fewer than a half-dozen doctors within the borders of one of the world’s poorest nations.
We got to the earthquake zone on a Yemeni Army helicopter carrying blankets and water to the victims. We circled several villages and chose one at random, a village at the top of a hill. Like the others, it was a panorama of collapsed huts, frantic searches, praying fathers, wailing mothers, crushed corpses.
And it was raining. Biblical torrents of rain.
That’s where we came to a scene very much like what I saw in that video today from Afghanistan. Four Yemeni men digging with their hands. Removing stones the size of basketballs. This had been the home of one of them.
After almost an hour, they found what they were digging for. One father's son. A little boy who couldn't have been more than four. And would never get older.
He was mangled and bloody, but the father cradled him in his arms as if he were still alive. He kissed him. He rocked him. He hugged him.
Parenthood is universal. That is a lesson I learned many times in many places like this. It is a lesson you will likely learn yourself if you look at today’s landscape of misery in Afghanistan.
Earlier on that day in Yemen, we had seen a line of men praying. I asked an English-speaking Yemeni what they were praying for. "Help from Allah," he told me. "What kind of help do they expect?”, I asked. "No more shaking. No more death. No more rain."
It seems Allah didn't hear them. The rain kept falling. The ground shook more. The death toll rose.
By our measure, the survivors had little even before the earthquake leveled their world to the ground. They had nothing after.
Italy’s earthquake was like Afghanistan’s in a different way. Dozens of towns and villages had collapsed, and ultimately the death toll also was in the thousands. But the metaphor in my memory is a single family in a single home to which we came on the first morning after the earthquake struck.
The adobe house had collapsed on the mother, the father, and two children as they ate their supper at a round table, covered in a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. It happened so fast, the victims remained in their chairs. The plates of food remained on the table. But there was no more life. Nor would there ever be again.
Scenes undoubtedly seen today in Afghanistan.
On the third day in Italy, we set our helicopter down in a different town, like Yemen also chosen at random since all were flattened in the very same way.
We weren’t there long when we heard a man shouting and saw him frantically gesturing atop a huge pile of rubble. He was shouting in Italian, but one member of our camera crew knew the language and said, “He thinks he’s found someone alive.”
He had. Along with rescuers, we scrambled with our gear to the top of the pile and spent the next six hours there.
The man who had shouted that first alarm had heard a squeal— just a tiny, weak squeal, but it sounded human. It was. It was a woman who, we learned before the end of the day, had been buried about six feet down, trapped by concrete and thick wood beams, the body of her dead sister on top of her, which created an air bubble, which kept her alive.
Her name was Lisa.
On this, the third day after the earthquake, we watched those rescuers get her out. They had to work painstakingly slowly. This pile of rubble was a house of cards. Move the wrong stick or stone and the whole precarious pile could collapse, swallowing not just the survivor but the rescuers and, incidentally, us. Over time, the subterranean squeal came more often, and eventually got louder. Rescuers delicately opening a passage were getting closer and closer.
For six hours they warily snapped thin twigs and lifted small stones, wondering whether each would be the one to cause this pile to collapse upon itself.
But when a rescuer was pulled feet first from the opening with his face all bloody but said, “I touched Lisa’s hand, my blood doesn’t matter,” momentarily, nothing else mattered. Thousands died, but somewhere down there was a woman named Lisa, and she was alive.
There is no logic to disasters like this. Hurricanes and tornadoes, fires and floods. And earthquakes.
We should use them as reminders of how lucky we are. Especially when we see the suffering of those who aren’t. No matter where.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
“Her name was Lisa.”
There is something within us that turns away from the suffering of others, just as there is something within us that turns toward such suffering with care and compassion. In like manner, there is something within us that blinds us to who we really are, just as there is something within us that opens us to ourselves fully and without shame. Her name is Lisa. Her name is my name. My name is hers.
Thank you Greg
While natural disasters are universal you help us see and remember the humab tragedy.