There’s an eight-year-old Canadian boy serving as a sort of roving ambassador for UNICEF, a reward for having raised $50,000 in tsunami-relief money through a website he built in the days following Dec. 26. The Mums & Kids agency have taken him to India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives and now, Aceh province.
He is by all accounts a precocious young man with a sharp mind. But, you’ve gotta wonder what fundraisers are thinking bringing a child tourist and his parents into the midst of the greatest natural disaster of the past 200 years!
While the roads are passable and there really is a degree of “normalcy” returning to my backyard, the excavators on Friday scooped 38 bodies out of a canal that bisects the main east-west road through the capital, the city is dotted with mass graves and the typical VIP sight-seeing tour features a ruined landscape of homes literally erased from the earth’s surface along with the lives off tens of thousands of people, a disproportionate number of whom were children under the age of 12!
Even the elephants that featured prominently in early news reports, hauling cars from the rubble, have begun to die: Tantor or what ever his name was, died a few weeks back from tetanus. His tough hide was no protection from the fields of rusting metal and shattered pipe littering the ground where he walked.
The young Canadian may well have wanted to come to see for himself the devastation wrought by the tsunami but its about as appropriate as allowing an eight-year-old to watch slasher flix or triple-X porn.
This is not a PG entertainment experience. This is bloody Mordor, a rank place of pain and tears and damaged psyches, not a Pixar experience.
You want to reward him for work well done, and not insult someone who is obviously a bright bulb send him to the Smithsonian in DC for a couple of days or something along those lines. Sending a child to Aceh should be seen as a punishment, not a reward.