the day the tide turned
When a tsunami crashed onto the shores of Samoa, killing 149 people, Cherelle Jackson faced a moral dilemma. As a journalist her job was report the event to an international audience but, as a local, she was watching her community being destroyed. Rosie Brown uncovers the personal impact of reporting a natural disaster in your own back yard.
Still dressed in their flimsy cotton pyjamas, Cherelle Jackson and her sister giggled self-consciously as they obeyed the distant, shrill tone of the warning siren and clambered up the side of the grassy hill, unaware of the impending disaster, “While we were laughing, we had no idea that people were dying on the other side of the hill,” she recalls.
At 06.48 am, on the 29th September 2009, Cherelle and her sister were woken suddenly by the vigorous shaking of their family home. Events that followed had never, in living history, been witnessed on the small paradise islands of Samoa.
colossal earthquake
A colossal earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale generated a series of powerful tsunami waves, each the height of a double decker bus. The waves pounced on the Pacific isle at such a pace that any preparation was impossible. And within just ten minutes, twenty Samoan villages were wiped out leaving a hopeless scene of death and devastation.
“You either run or die”, Cherelle said, her voice breaking mid-sentence. She took a breath before continuing, “My friend hesitated and went back to get a shirt. He died.”
thousands evacuated
As thousands of evacuated Samoans collected on higher ground that morning, many like Cherelle, were unaware that their loved ones were being swept away by the tide. In a close-knit society with a population of just 180,000, it is likely that not one person in Samoa emerged from the tragedy without losing a relative.
But as soon as the earthquake struck Cherelle knew she had a job to do. When I asked at what point she became a journalist, not a victim, she replied: “Immediately.”
Determined to reach the areas worst hit by the tsunami, Cherelle left her home in Vailima and travelled across the country. She listened intently to the local radio station as countless witnesses called in, describing the disastrous scenes.
Contending mudslides and road blocks, Cherelle employed her boyfriend and sister as temporary PA’s to filter calls from international news agencies. Their three phones rang continuously during the hour and a half drive. Cherelle was in demand, “AFP, AP and Reuters wanted information immediately,” she recalls.
foreign correspondent
Now a successful foreign correspondent, Cherelle began her career working for a local newspaper, the Samoa Observer. She was raised on the small island of Upolo by her English father and Samoan mother and never imagined she would be reporting such a large-scale natural disaster in her own country. “Tsunamis occur on the news and in the movies. They don’t happen here.”
The scale of devastation that greeted them on the other side of the island was indescribable. “It was only when we saw it that we believed it,” Cherelle says. As the three Samoans drove down the hill, the first thing Cherelle remembers seeing were fishing boats that had been out at sea just hours before, now parked on the road.
moral dilemma
Despite every attempt to put her emotions aside, Cherelle began to cry. “You cannot separate from it. Nothing could have prepared me for it, no matter how much training you’ve done – and I’ve done this for a long time – nothing could have prepared me for it. At all.”
Faced with the dilemma of dealing with her own grief or informing the international community about the unfolding disaster, Cherelle chose the latter; simply finding an appropriate time to cry – often between phone calls.
The international news agencies were impatiently requesting the latest death toll. They wanted figures on the amount of tourists, nationals and children dead. The number of injured and those unaccounted for. Cherelle went into autopilot, “I didn’t question it after a while, it was just automatic, you’re just responding, you just do it.” She simply drove to the hospital and counted the bodies lined up on the floor before her.
It wasn’t until Cherelle arrived home at two o’clock in the morning, that she allowed herself to reflect on the days events. “I remember sitting down and seeing the dust still on my feet. I started having images of my friend who died.”
resentment
According to Cherelle the experience has ‘changed her life.’ After an initial feeling of guilt for reporting the death of her own people, she had to identify why she was doing it. “I had to make peace with myself, there were people dying around me and I’m on the phone. For a while there I resented the fact that I was a journalist.”
Cherelle donated all of her correspondent fees to one family who lost everything in the tsunami, she was unable to deal with the shame that she was profiting on the back of such tragedy. “It felt like it was wrong, because every phone call I made, was me earning money.”
She remembers seeing a colleague’s status update on Facebook that said: ‘I don’t have enough tears.’ Cherelle identified strongly with that message and realised, through speaking with journalists across the island, that many were experiencing the same feelings of trauma and grief.
As the secretary of the Journalist’s Association of Western Samoa (JAWS), Cherelle had received messages of sympathy and support from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). In a first for the Pacific Isles, Cherelle appealed to the IFJ for help. It was arranged for a councillor and a war correspondent to visit the island to offer support. They arrived exactly one month after the tsunami crashed onto Samoa’s shores.
counselling
Cait McMahon, Managing Director for the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma-Australasia (DART) was one of the team dispatched to Samoa. As a psychologist, Cait has worked in many traumatic situations before, including numerous natural disasters and war zones. But this was the first time that help from DART had been requested directly by a journalist.
Cait listened to the journalists in groups, or individually if they wanted. “It was not so much a counselling session but more like an opportunity for people to sit and talk about their personal experiences,” she said. “People were so relieved to find out they were not ‘going crazy’.”
nightmares, irritability and anger
Nightmares, irritability and unusual anger, depression and a lack of motivation, are all “typical, normal reactions that happen after a trauma,” according to Cait. She says the amount of support made available to journalists is very much down to the individual news organisations. “Some have a tough ‘put up with it’ culture … others are becoming more trauma-aware”.
The impact on Cherelle is evident. Following the recent earthquake in Haiti, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the television images or even listen to the radio reports. She struggles to write about the experience, “the longest I’ve written is two sentences, I’ve tried but I just can’t. It’s like reliving it.”
I ask Cherelle if more should be done for journalists reporting on natural disasters? She replies emphatically: “Yes. Definitely. There is a lot of focus on war correspondents and so much counselling going to them. But they’re doing it by choice. They put themselves in that situation. People who report on disasters don’t have a choice. Something hits them in the face and they have to cover it.”
Communication: A dying art?
‘CLICK’
There it was. Me and my beau officially ‘in a relationship’. And if facebook said it, it must be true.
It might have taken a few sherbets the previous evening to complete the final move on the mouse, but now 342 friends could sleep safe in the knowledge that I was no longer going to be an out-of-date, rusty and dented reduced-priced-tin, shelved and discarded at the back of the cupboard.
But hang on. What’s that? I notice a link at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. My love-bunny had been tagged in a new album. But when? Where? He hadn’t left my side for days. Furiously following the link, I am confronted with an image not dissimilar to a slightly less voluptuous Pamela Anderson. My heart sinks. How? I ask myself.
I check on his profile, scouring the latest posts frantically, my throat closing in on itself by the second. Not even an ounce of evidence. That’s it. He must be a serial cheater, expert in deception.
I text my closest friend. In anticipation of a dramatic emotional meltdown, she facebook-chats me instantly, offering a sympathetic understanding and a determination to uncover the identity of the top-heavy blonde.
My brother phones me. I press reject. How disrespectful can he get? Does he not know that I am in the midst of a breakdown here? But a deep bellow soon echoes up the stairs, “Your dinner’s ready”. As if I could eat now! I send him a message on MSN to tell him, to tell mum, that I’m not hungry. He then writes on my facebook wall informing my boss, my guinea pig and my 340 other friends, that I am fasting in an attempt to lose two stone in two days. Excellent.
Before I have a chance to respond, Skype rears its aqua blue head with a mood message ….. FROM HIM.
A heart?! A HEART?! Is he crazy?! How can he be so insensitive? I tweet in rage – ’MEN!’. (Secretly hoping Stephen Fry would offer some words of wisdom, he never did get back to me).
Meanwhile, I check said suspects blog for cryptic clues. The last entry was over a week ago. Nothing. Suddenly an alarm sounds on my Blackberry informing me that I have a new email in my inbox. “You have been invited to join a group”. I complete the infuriating security checks for what seems like the thousandth time, only to be greeted with a rather unsubtly named facebook group: ‘WHO IS THIS GIRL?’.
I’ve got to give her credit, my friend knows how to get what she wants. Mentally calculating how many friends-of-friends would be viewing that very same page, at the very same time as me, I am forced to stop at 900, safe in the knowledge that I have been well and truely facebooked.
Somewhere in the distance, my brain picks out the familiar melody of my message tone: You have two new messages.
Paul: It’s my sister.
Facebook: You are now listed as single.
And if facebook says it, it must be true.
Who Ever Heard of a Healthy Hack?
So here’s one for you:
What do you get when you put a nurse in a newsroom?
A lack of patience.
Get it? “Boo. Hiss.” I hear the cries! And believe me there have been plenty of those.
You see, there was once an incredible idea in this slightly warped mind of mine, and it involved leaving the rewarding and angelically perceived profession of nursing, to become a hack. Albeit a healthy one.
My head was full of glorious visions to give the impoverished a voice, raise awareness about disease and suffering and why the heck not, to feed the world in the process! And then … and then … I met my new patients.
Now, these were not any type of patient. No! These beuts were more of the slightly greying stern-but-silent type, prone to collapse at any given moment. Granted, they didn’t answer back, but THE PC is not particularly familiar with the words “Get me the commode, matron!” Yes, my dear friend, THE PC.
The clinical observations at the start of a shift have been replaced with technological observations to work out which lead is missing, or which button I pressed, or HOW I MANAGED TO LOSE THE ENTIRE DAYS WORK!
It has been an interesting few months and I hope you will be able to witness the growth of this new, and sometimes testing relationship. I may even have to embed a link or two (oooooh, check the lingo).
As THE PC and I progress from the awkward, “can you just put this backless gown on” phase, to the, “I won’t tell matron if you go for a sneaky fag” phase, I want to get blogging.
So ironically, a terribly bad joke couldn’t be more apt. I have lost my patients, but my new patients aren’t half bad once you get to know them. And fixing them is a darn site easier – it generally involves switching them off, counting to ten and switching them back on again.
I wouldn’t recommend it to nurses.
