Naheed Mustafa

I admit that I completely broke down today. I cried uncontrollably. I couldn’t hold myself together after witnessing what I saw with my own eyes. Today, we went to film a journalistic report inside the displacement tents along the seashore. I swear, what we witnessed was beyond what any human being should have to endure. I saw men crying bitterly. Men I had never seen cry when they lost their children or when their homes were destroyed. Today, I saw them crying because they were powerless to do the simplest thing: protect their children from the water and the cold. We spoke to families who told us they had spent the entire night carrying their children in their arms after floodwater covered the floors of their tents and soaked their mattresses. They couldn’t find a single dry place to put their children. They couldn’t even give them a few hours of sleep. I saw children no older than five, without proper clothes to protect them from the cold, without heating, and without a dry place to sleep. Children shivering inside tents that cannot keep out the rain, protect them from the wind, or provide even the most basic sense of safety. What more must happen for this world to act? How much more suffering must people endure before someone remembers that they are human beings? I am sick of this world. I am sick of its hypocrisy and empty slogans. To hell with a world that talks endlessly about human rights while leaving children to drown inside their tents. To hell with everyone who has witnessed this suffering and chosen silence, and to hell with the governments and institutions that have the power to act but continue to turn their backs on us.