His eyes are wide, like black liquid beauty staring at me, at us, while we handle him gently, taking him in turns to hold him in our arms. He does not look scared. His fine Somali features express only a sense of dignified tranquility, accepting the fact that he has become one of the most loved creatures by the sanitary personnel managing the little camp of tents close to the hospital. We all compete in trying to fill him with affection and attention. He is two, maybe three years old. He is a lovely gentle child, who is slowly succumbing to AIDS and his family are already wiped out. It is November 2000 and I find myself in Somaliland, (ex British Somalia), leading a development project in the area of Boroma, close to the Ethiopian border. It's an awful November when around 30 children will die at the hospital, ravaged by cholera, parasites or AIDS. That's a child a day, which is such a blow to our attempts to maintain them in life and there is a sense of desperate impotence filling our minds and nurturing the nightmares troubling our sleep.
It's a deeply hard experience, being so close to death... but it helped me realise again how beautiful, fragile, and thrilling life and to be alive is. It put one thing back on top of my personal scale of values - surviving.
Survival is really a simple concept in itself, but regulating each single moment of our existence and we only need a few basic things to be able to survive. Water to drink, food to eat and air to breath are needs, while a shelter, clothes, medicines are mere 'add-ons' helping us to live longer. Take away just one of the first three and we are doomed. So it is with deep incredulity that every time I go back to my country, fully belonging now to the Western culture, I observe how we now take our survival chances for granted. When did we forget that we depend on the 'outer' world? When did things start to go really wrong with our ability to see the reality surrounding us? When did our cultural arrogance become incommensurable and when did we commit the ultimate disastrous ethical blunder by starting to consider money a survival tool, more important than air, food or water? All these are questions I would love to pose to the companies who own the deep sea fishing vessels whose routes I have crossed while driving an inflatable in these waters. I want to reach out to them and communicate these simple concepts but I have a feeling that they would not have the will to understand or change. But the governments of the respective countries, which are involved in this plunder, have the power and the moral responsibility to do something. We are all hoping that they will establish a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling at the next UN meeting! So I encourage everyone to take the cyberaction and make your voice heard, along with mine.
Where is the sense in destroying the resources we live upon? It would be like being at home, opening our filled fridge to eat maybe one or two things we find inside while throwing the rest in the garbage bin with, in addition, the fridge itself. Finally it is only a matter of having enough money for doing it. Madness... complete, utter, total ethical madness.
There is so much fog around us. It's a chilly greyness but nothing compared to the fog blinding our minds. We do not stop for a moment to consider the consequences of what we do, even if we directly stumble upon them, even if the fish catches are lower along with the economical gains while the hours of work are longer and people are getting poorer with each passing day. Even the huge worried outcry uttered now, so late, by the whole scientific community remains unanswered. We, the 'masters' of this poor world, have no time to spare for these "petty" problems.
Only two centuries ago the coastal waters of this area of the world were so full of fish that they could hinder the navigation. An easy catch! In the 60's, only 40 years ago, 800 000 tonnes a year of cod were sucked from these seas with the blessing of part of the scientific community, affirming that the oceans resources would be boundless for eternity... ten years later the cod had already virtually disappeared. William W. Warner, in his book 'Distant Water' believed that the fish population crisis of that time would have put a stop (like a natural kind of limit) to overfishing but he was wrong. When resources had been depleted from the shallow waters, we sought for the fish further below. It was just a matter of adjusting our gear. From cod to shrimp, from herring to halibut, from tuna to redfish, deeper and deeper, where no light is, where no man has set foot, where life and its diversity are still a mystery, with gear so destructive that we leave a desert behind, annihilating ten or twenty folds to get one... but, hey babe, we live for the day, don't we?
Going deeper and deeper, reaching down into blackness, scraping the bottom of the barrel, of our conscience, of our sense of responsibility, of the seas...
From the middle of this grey world with madness all around us, a hug to all of you that still believe, as I do, that we will be able to stop it.
--Rosso
Comments
What a mind, I feel as you do, so frustrated at how completely selfish an inhumane people can be, and all this just to add to their fortunes. How can people destroy such beauty? I have just come back from India, working in an orphanage and it is so hard to fit back in, to feel settled in this Western culture when everybody just cares about what they look like or how they can buy their next drink or pack of fags. When will it all end, I would love to send all these people, the governments included, to work with the children in Africa or India or any other country for that matter, of which there are so many these days, and see how they feel then! I wonder though if it would actually make a difference or if they would just find another means of exploiting them. Is there a solution? I hope with all my heart and soul that there is and that I will help find it somehow, it might ease the pain and sleepless nights that this fire inside of me is causing!
