Between Here and There
By Rebekah Meek
As an attempt to recover from a serious bout of jetlag caused by a 30-hour flight from Colombo to Raleigh, I immediately tried to re-enter my day-to-day routine. My eyes, however, were still heavily lidded when I 
realized that the reverse culture shock I was about to experience from my recent trip to Sri Lanka was not going to be smooth.
I don’t remember the specific item that begrudgingly brought me to Walmart after I was unable to find it anywhere else in town, but I distinctly remember the moment I walked through those whirring automatic doors. A blast of air conditioning made me briefly close my eyes; when I reopened them, I was confronted by a garish display of neon plastic picnicware. I felt so intensely angry that I actually balled my hands into fists, turned my heel, and walked right back through the open doors. I’m typically a fairly rational person so I should have realized that what I was experiencing had nothing to do with the actual display of hot pink margarita glasses and accompanying flamingo drink stirs, but I was utterly exhausted. So much that I couldn’t recognize anything beyond my disgust, so I stomped my way back to my car.
But as I pulled my ringing cell phone out of my pocket I started to realize what this distress was all about: I wanted to believe that my reaction was a metaphor for some greater social ill—about how in the U.S. we find happiness in materialism, but in Sri Lanka, it’s the people, not the things, that matter most. My response, however, was a much more personal affliction.
I spent part of my final semester at Meredith College organizing relief efforts for tsunami-affected Sri Lanka and was fortunate to travel with a small group of people affiliated with my university to see the country first hand.
When I was in Sri Lanka, I left almost all of my creature comforts at home. I still felt pampered, however, sunbathing on the private beach at the Mt. Lavinia Hotel when I could still feel the suffocating hot air inside the aluminum temporary shacks that so many refugees were now calling home. The tsunami is not the only cause of suffering for the people of Sri Lanka. Years of civil war and other tragedies have left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and living under conditions that we, as Americans, would find absolutely unfit.
When I returned home, I felt as if I were speaking Greek when I told their stories to my friends and family. I felt as if I couldn’t give the experience the justice it deserved. The people I met in Sri Lanka were so open in offering their stories to me I felt it would be unforgivable to keep all of that loss and sadness and hope inside me. I had looked into a mother’s eyes as she told me about how she watched her child be swept away by the water; I held that young boy’s hand when he told me that now even the rain makes him afraid; and I stood in front of a grown man who tries to speak but can only succumb to tears. Back home, I felt like the ancient mariner, telling my story to anyone who would listen, and I was stuck somewhere between the present and where I had just recently been with very little to connect the two.
That’s when I realized that the relief work I was doing back home was not just to help out those affected by the tsunami. It was also a huge relief to me. It was helping me process the experience by describing it. I used my photography and documentary as a way to communicate these stories to the people in my own community. Each time I felt I had reached someone, the sense of the futility of this experience lessened a little more. I was beginning to bridge the here and the there.
I’ve found that it’s in those few moments after I’ve shown my documentary, when the silence and stillness fills up the room, that culture, religion, race, and gender all disappear. Sitting in the darkness, faced with the raw emotion of human tragedy, we can’t help but recognize that the sadness and hope in those stories are no different from our own. n
Rebekah Ann Meek is a documentary photographer, graphic designer, and activist from Durham, N.C. She currently works at the Independent Weekly as a graphic designer and is interested in pursuing a long-term documentary project in Southeast Asia focusing on women and domestic worker’s rights. To find out
more about the relief efforts visit www.meredith.edu/tsunamirelief.