What were you doing in early August? What have you done in the weeks since?
As for me - in early August, I was in India, travelling, reporting, meeting people, eating dhosas and tandoori chicken, enjoying the sudden monsoon showers. Then I came home with a suitcase full of baubles for my daughters who I couldn’t stop hugging after three weeks away. And since then I’ve been working, taking care of my kids, playing the piano, going to movies, the occasional party. In short it’s a busy, full life with lots going on.
And I’m sure most of you reading this would be able to draw up quite a list of activities too.
So think then of the Chilean 33 - that’s all we need now to identify them - the whole world knows who they are. The group of men who’ve set an amazing record. They’ve just emerged from a miracle rescue after 69 days in the belly of the earth.
I mean think of it. WOW.
And by all accounts, they’re perfectly fine.
It’s a story that gets more captivating the more you read and hear about it - and we’ve been hearing plenty over the last days. And their recent 24 hour rescue operation was broadcast live around the world. It’s the kind of story that inevitably makes us wonder - how would I have reacted in their place?
They’re going to be rock stars of course now - despite their own pleas to the media not to build them up as such. But it’s easy to focus on the celebratory hoo haa of the last days as hundreds of reporters descended on Camp Hope, set up by the men’s families.
Spend a moment though thinking of their first 17 days, when no one knew they were still alive. They’d each been surviving on a mouthful of food a day and most of them had already reached a critical physical condition. But somehow they still found the will to keep going in that dark airless and lonely prison of rock; they’d rationed their tiny supplies, found water, and kept up a collective order and will to survive - even when for all they knew, the world had forgotten them.
I’ve interviewed people who’ve spent two decades in Robben Island prison; I once interviewed Brian Keenen held hostage in Beirut for four years, most of which he spent chained to the wall. I’ve met Vincent Cochotel locked in a Chechen dungeon for a year. When they were going through them, they’d all hated these encounters with their own personal hell. But when talking about those years, to a man, they said that the worst experience of their lives also transformed them into better human beings. And they were right. They had gone through fire and came out the stronger for it. I suspect that the Chilean 33 will feel the same.
We the bystanders feel, yes, exhultated at the good news story in this so often horrid world. But I feel a more complicated emotion: sure, there’s a heartfelt gratitude that it wasn’t me trapped inside all that rock for so long, wondering if I’d ever see my children again. But to be honest, there’s something else - I can’t quite give it an exact name, but could it be envy of what this experience has and will bring to the lives of these men?
