New Hope in Samoa

I always wondered about journalists that report on people in crisis, and whether they ever actually help them. Here is the good news, reported by Radio Australia, about a Kiwi journalist.

Yes, some must have a basic level of humanity in them. The nature of their job must certainly place them in very surreal and emotionally ambivalent situations.

In reading that piece, it occurred to me that there is always something implicitly 'surreal' in tourism anyway. People seek only that part of the real world which supports a particular image or fantasy of 'paradise'. Sometimes the reality, in the form of a natural disaster, puts full stop to the fantasy.

Too bad that a so-called disaster is bad for business. Perhaps if people were more interested in the reality of the places they visit to start off with, they might be less put off by these fantasy-bursting events, and might act more humanely. Certainly, the same story in SE Asia. The best thing tourists could do was to not cancel their holidays but to bring their business to these places and help in the recovery.