In other family news...

[muckefuck]

...the Thai island on which my mother's first cousin was to marry his Chinese fiance this New Year's was apparently not in the path of a tsunami and the wedding will proceed as planned. I thought that, when she suggested we attend, my mom told me it was near Phuket, but perhaps it was sheltered from the force of the wave. My great-aunt, who was due to fly in on St. Stephen's Day, arrived safely and now has a story she'll be telling and retelling for months, if not years.

My sister was avidly following the news on the Net, but I've been avoiding it so far. It's one of those tragedies that's just so huge, I can't wrap my mind around it. 50,000 dead and climbing. Entire villages washed away. The geopolitical map could shift because of this. (Already, one parliamentary election has had to be postponed.) The physical map already has.

Edit: And now I've just read that beaches near Penang were struck and I'm trying to remember when Bumiputeri was supposed to return from visiting her family there...

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Have you heard anything about Mary Anne? princeofcairo thought she was supposed to be visiting her family in Sri Lanka for the holidays this year.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

From her 12/26 journal entry:

None of my immediate or slightly extended family are in the country at the moment. I haven't had a chance to talk to my folks yet, so I don't know whether we do have relatives or friends there who have been affected. I'll let you know if I learn more. Thanks for the good thoughts, everyone. This is a particularly terrible thing to happen to a country that is still trying desperately to recover from the ravages of almost two decades of civil war. It would be terrible at any time, in any place of course, but the timing of this is particularly bad. In two thousand years of recorded history, Sri Lanka has never encountered a disaster on anything like this scale.

I'm still planning on travelling there from February 6th to March 7th, at least for now.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link; I think princeofcairo told me she had a online journal a while ago but I forgot all about it ...