Lost and Alone

She sat motionless on what once was the front door of her home in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. The structure along with most of the city had been destroyed a few days earlier by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake.  I don’t know if the woman lost any family in the earthquake but she looked lost and alone in a sea of broken concrete and steel reinforcement rods.
Most westerners have no sense of what a real tragedy is. The morning earthquake killed more than 80,000 people. That's as many people who attend a major college football game in the United States.
I ventured into and out of a number of places destroyed by the Pakistani earthquake while shooting for The Associated Press. It was torture to travel anywhere by road and there were virtually no accommodations other than in the front seat of an Islamabad taxi.  How could I transmit photos from the earthquake?  I did it with digital cameras and a laptop computer.  When I could get a hotel the first question asked was “are your phone lines working?”
I spent two weeks in the earthquake zone before returning to Thailand and onto a beach and a bottle of Tequila to wash away the memories.