Me

into a violent and muddled river, full of debris that flooded up to the second floor of many buildings and damaged miles of beach.
    All throughout the Indian Ocean there were more tsunamis of similar magnitude, crashing against the coasts of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and, seven hours after the initial earthquake, in Somalia. The tsunami was the most lethal in history and left an entire region so devastated that it is still struggling to fully recover today.
    When I arrived in Thailand, some ten days after the earthquake happened, they took me to the Pang Na region and told me there were other areas where the damage was five times worse than what I was seeing. It’s really hard for me to imagine that, because where I was standing the situation looked very grim. The school was transformed into a hospital, someone’s home became a school, and the Buddhist temple was now a morgue. So the temple, that place where one normally goes to find some sort of spiritual life, was now populated by physical death. Stop and think about that for a moment.
    But in the midst of so much devastation, there was also hope. Many children had been orphaned, but I felt that I could still do something for them. What happens in times like this, as I explained before, is that the traffickers take advantage of the situation during natural disasters. They take advantage of the hopelessness of the situation and literally go fishing in the streets. They know there will be many lost children, without families to protect them and completely scared. When they come upon a child who is crying for his mother, they know that this child will believe anyone who says, “I know where your parents are. Come with me.”
    And that’s how they are taken. And that’s exactly why I wanted to go there. Wherever there is a natural disaster, where there is chaos, it offers the opportunity that a trafficker seeks to exploit, taking advantage of the most vulnerable and stealing their most basic human rights.
    At a hospital where orphans were being lodged, I met the youngest survivor of the tsunami, who had been dubbed Baby Wave. Baby Wave appeared in the center of the city floating on a mattress when he was only days old. Someone had stuck a note to his clothes that said: “I found this boy in the beach area, but I have no food to give him. I have nothing for him. Please, take care of him.”
    It was a miracle in the midst of all the destruction, so the nurses were protecting him as if he was a little jewel. But they had to hide him in an office and monitor him day and night, because when the press got wind of the fact that the youngest survivor of the tsunami had been found, people came from all over claiming to be his parents or perhaps an uncle. But when the nurses said they would be happy to administer a DNA test, they would all disappear.
    There were people who even pretended to be doctors, saying they had to take him to another hospital for this or that exam. It was all a lie. They were all traffickers who wanted to take him and sell him or God knows what. The love the nurses showed in their protection of Baby Wave was inspiring, and holding him in my arms was another moment in my life I will always remember. He represented hope.
    In the midst of so much death and suffering, I also saw some very beautiful things. I met, for example, the woman who transformed her house into a school because she felt it important that the surviving children not be left without one. It was a very modest house, with a mud floor, located in a small Thai fishing town. Every morning sixty kids would show up, and she would sit them in a small area inside the house, where she set up a chalkboard so they could read and write. They were of all ages, up to nine or ten years old. They had little chairs and used some wooden boards as tables. Maybe for us that’s not much, but the truth is that they weren’t missing a thing. They had food and water, a calm and clean house to learn in, and someone to look after them.
    The woman who opened her home in this way was very intelligent because she knew it was not only about the children continuing on with their studies; she knew what they really needed was to stay busy and occupied. It was important that they kept their minds active so that they wouldn’t have time to think about the great tragedy they were living through. The fact that they could stay with her all day kept them safe, because if those kids had not been at school or