The Flood of 2011

As soon as the school canceled parent teacher conferences, my parents and I drove north to my grandmother’s house in Nong Khai—a town in northeastern Thailand. Until today, the fact that vicious torrents of floodwater were overwhelming many civilian areas felt unreal to me. The flood was but a secondhand experience that I could only witness through at TV screen; I was completely alienated from what was happening.

I find it difficult to write a blog on the current flood, because I do not feel like I am a victim in the same sense as those who lost their homes or livelihoods. I feel as though I am not qualified to speak to the suffering and destruction caused by the flood, because I do not know what it is like to go through that. Today, however, as my parents and I made our way back to Bangkok, I got a glimpse of the true nature of the flood. I saw a wheat field under murky water, with the occasional half submerged tree or lamppost. The farmers had taken to their homes, and the usually lively landscape seemed absolutely lifeless. But faded lines on the electricity poles at the side of the road indicated that water in the area had subsided, leading us to believe that the danger had passed, and the situation had calmed. Instead of taking the safer, roundabout route that we had taken on our way out of Bangkok, my parents chose to take a shortcut through Wang Noi, an area that had recently suffered from severe flooding. The traffic at Wang Noi was nearly unbearable. Every two minutes or so, our car crawled forward one meter. Frustrated and with only 600 meters left before we were to turn right and leave the town, my parents attempted to avoid the congestion by veering off the main road and onto a flooded strip of lower ground. Although the water started out quite shallow, the further we went, the higher it rose. As we sloshed sluggishly through the water, I heard an ominous gurgling coming from the trunk of our car. Water had seeped through the doors at an alarming speed, so that, within a few minutes, my shoes were bobbing up and down in flood water.

This morning, when I started my blog, I had planned to write a generic, and rather impersonal, piece about how the flood caused much hardship to the citizens of Thailand and how it could be symbolically represented by the furniture in my house—our sofa precariously balanced on the coffee table represented the people displaced from their homes, forced by nature to seek refuge in flood shelters. But now I realize that it’s more than just a severe case of inconvenience that plagues flood victims. By no means am I trying to say that I know fully the feelings of those whose houses and livelihoods were destroyed by the flood. This experience simply gave me a taste of what others had taken on at full steam. I chose this picture because the moment I took it, which was a little while before our car was half submerged in floodwater, was the first time that I had seen with my own eyes the disaster caused by the flood. It embodies, for me, the unease a flood victim faces as he chooses a limited number of belongings to bring with him, if he even has the time to bring anything at all, and the panic that consumes him as the water level rises constantly and unpredictably. Just looking at the picture, one could see that the water level is unbelievably high, and having to be stuck in the middle of that must have been absolutely terrifying for the flood victims.

I now realize just how fortunate I am that my house and those of my relatives are safe and dry. Now that I’m back in Bangkok and have a chance to help with flood relief efforts, I know that, instead of helping out of obligation, I’ll be helping with the sincere hope that I can alleviate the suffering of the flood victims, and that means a lot to me.