It's the little things that get through

It's the small things that get through to you. However large the scale of catastrophe, disaster is always small, personal, human sized.

Today I heard a man evacuated from New Orleans cry as he talked of his worry for his two missing children. It's not that they may be dead; he last saw them when they were lifted away from the roof of his flood bound home by a helicopter. He knows that they were rescued from the immediate physical danger, but his voice was desperate with worry.

Long ago, in another galaxy, I once lost track of two children for a few days. The circumstances weren't the same, but there were similarities. After a period of risk, in a period of social disorder, the children were separated from me by the same event that removed the immediate hazards. I spent three days stuck in a building which was a tiny microcosm of the Superdome, then tried to find them.

Those children were nothing to do with me. They were the grandchildren of a neighbour; one I knew only slightly and the other I had met only on the day when chance placed him in my care. Yet in the days until I located them, safe and sound, I was more frantic, driven and unbalanced than any other time in my life. I cannot begin to imagine how it would be if they were my own children, as they are for that man. It makes a bigger impact than all the bodies, all the smashed and flooded homes, in the world.