Omayra Sánchez was one of the 25,000 victims of the Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia) volcano which erupted on November 14, 1985. The picture was taken shortly before she died. She was alive for three days trapped and no one could help her.
Omayra was trapped up to her neck in water, concrete, and other debris for three days before she succumbed to gangrene and hypothermia. During three nights of agony, Omayra seemed strong but was suffering. According to a journalist who kept records of the events, Omayra sang and had normal conversations with the people who were trying to help her. The little girl was thirsty and scared. On the third night, Omayra began hallucinating, saying that she did not want to be late for school. At some point she asked the people to leave her so they could rest.
Television coverage of the disaster introduced her to the world when she was still alive. The photo shown here was taken hours before her death and published after her death.
I was looking at the photo when I realized the antiquity of the photograph. Omayra has been dead for 21 years. On the day of the volcano erruption, I was three months old. On the day she died ,I was three months three days old.
The 23,000 deaths may be a statistic but each death is an individual tragedy.Its something to think about. We humans call ourselves so civilized, our civilization is at its Zenith and still such tragedies occur.
To everyone who reads this post, I have only one request. Download the photograph on your comp. And then once its done , open the photograph with windows picture and media viewer and zoom it to the size of your monitor.
And look into the eyes and imagine three days of suffering before a horrible death.
Some people consider photographs to be a sacrilege. It is said that each photograph captures a part of the person soul.
Maybe a part of the soul of Omayra Sanchez stares back at us!!!
Bye. Happy musings
2 comments:
Search for tragedies on the internet and i am sure you'd be able to find more than you can handle...
The one that this image stirs up in my mind is the one with a stricken child crawling towards a food camp
In fact check out this site.
You will find loads of pics u'd like to put up on ur blog, here.
I agree that there are too many tragedies on the net but there is somethin haunting about photos and video's like these.
We can read about 70,000 dead in the tsunami but a single image like these can change these. I have been to the site world famous photos.
I think its about there is something fearful yet real in these photos. Like a real bogey-man or Jason(Friday the 13th).
The child dying out of hunger is a tragic photo also. The loneliness of the child, the cruelty of nature is all their. Do we really count our blessings?? Do we thank God that we are not the one starving, when in another place, another time we could be. What seperates that reality from this.
And tragedies continue. From violence in Iraq to famine in AFrica.
Innocents still die.
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