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By Alex Perry
Posted Monday, October 3, 2005; 21:00 HKT
Zaeema Ismail should have led a quiet, sheltered life. The 14-year-old girl was born and raised on the type of desert island found in cartoon strips, a bump of sand and palms the size of a soccer field in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Gemendhoo. The 400 people who lived there survived on fish, coconuts and rainwater, and divided the world into Gemendhoo and the giant unseen lands over the horizon. To the west was Africa, to the south, Antarctica, and 3,000 km to the east, Indonesia.
Distance didn't protect Gemendhoo from the tsunami. With the same fury that smashed Aceh and parts of Thailand, Sri Lanka and India before it, the wave devastated the island, part of the Maldives archipelago. Zaeema says she was sweeping her grandmother's house when she heard the roar of the water. She ran home and saw the first wave breach the reef, hit the shore and wash clean over the island, sweeping people, houses and bicycles a kilometer out to sea. In a ditch behind their house, Zaeema held fast to her brother Mohammed, 2, while her mother Faheema grabbed two other children, Azma, 5, and Fatima, 9. But when the waters subsided, Zaeema's 64-year-old grandmother Mariyam—"Mama"—was lying face down in a newly-formed lagoon. "And that could have been it for them," says Mohamed Naeem, a UNICEF officer who met Zaeema later in a refugee camp on the nearby island of Kudahuvadhoo. Grief and loss made mutes of Zaeema's mother and brother. And with her father away fishing, the family imploded. "We've seen it a lot," says Naeem. "People stop talking. With so much left unsaid, they drift apart. The family just disintegrates."
Zaeema had never heard the word "trauma." But she could see that an invisible beast was devouring her family unit. "Everybody was just sitting and waiting and waiting," she says. "Nobody was saying anything. If I tried to talk about Mama, they just walked away. They refused to believe she was dead." In the hope of meeting a doctor who could help, she took meticulous notes of how Mohammed had screaming nightmares, how her mother wouldn't talk and suffered a total loss of appetite, and how she and her sisters would awake in a sweat when the wind rustled in the trees.
In February, Naeem set up a trauma workshop on Kudahuvadhoo. Zaeema learned how tsunamis were formed, how uncommon they were, and how her family's behavior was normal in tragedy. She also took home some tried-and-tested methods for trauma recovery, and over the next few weeks brought the family members together over everyday chores like cooking and laundry. Encouraging her family to chatter about the weather kept them busy and distracted. The plan worked. It may be a while before there are family picnics on the beach again, but today, Zaeema's mother eats normally, her brother sleeps soundly, and their tin hut is alive with laughter.
UNICEF trauma specialist Reina Michaelson says it is unusually bold in the conservative culture of the Maldives for a girl to take charge of her family. Zaeema didn't rescue anyone, or donate aid, or rebuild a town or village. But she lifted her loved ones out of despair, showing the sense of spirit and hope that has typified Asia's response to the tsunami. Says Naeem: "This was a simple girl who did some simple things and achieved something extra-ordinary. She held her family together."
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