reporting from disaster zones

One of the most disorientating consequences of covering a natural disaster is coming home. You go from witnessing a fragile world turned upside down to getting irritated by a delayed Tube train all within the same day. Soon, you’re back into discussing what to cook for dinner and what time your son needs to be picked up from his swimming lesson. And then, in an off-guard moment, you are troubled to have left behind someone whose unthinkably dreadful circumstances you were writing about a week before. I often think about people like the lady I watched searching for her relatives in the stagnant tsunami floodwaters in Kamaishi, or the mum of the malnourished baby girl I saw dying in Somalia. How did they carry on?