Hard Numbers Don't Tell The Whole Story

There are some pretty sobering numbers in the news this week – 100,000 people killed in the Myanmar cyclone, and at least 12,000 killed by the earthquake in Sichuan province in China.

These are numbers that stagger the imagination, make you feel small and insect-like, easy to blow away. It’s hard to feel anything other than despair in the face of such devastation. Certainly the lives of the survivors, especially in Myanmar, won’t get any easier in the months to come.

These staggering statistics obscure another, much smaller number, but one that has its own significance. Quietly, over the weekend, Orato.com’s 4,000th correspondent registered on the site. Our little community of citizen reporters is growing at a time when we’re all looking for eyewitness accounts and experiences to make sense of the senseless.

It’s one thing to see an earthquake through the dispassionate eye of a mainstream TV camera; the viewer and the victims are oddly detached from each other, creating in this viewer, at least, a feeling of unreality. You can tell the people are suffering but the camera is remorseless and impersonal. The camera doesn’t appear to care, so you are compelled to summon your own detachment. The world is reduced to a giant accident and you are relegated to the side, watching.

How much different is the news when it comes from Orato.com correspondent # 4000-plus Alvin Wong, who, although he is in Beijing, more than 2000 kilometres away from Chengdu, is right there emotionally. Thanks to Alvin for keeping us updated as we wait to hear the fate of the schoolchildren trapped by the quake.

The editorial team at Orato.com: myself, Heather Wallace, Robyn Stubbs and Mike Small, are combing the Internet looking for people who are reporting on their experiences in Myanmar and China. You can be part of this: if you are near the devastation, bring Orato.com into your experience – as you can see for yourself in Alvin’s report, even if you’re just near the Chengdu, Sichuan quake or the Irawaddy Delta in Myanmar, you can tell these stories in a way the mainstream media can’t or won’t: with all the emotion they require.

And if you’re not there, please participate wherever you are. When correspondents such as Bud Oracle, Michelle Kenneth and David Mixner add their voices to the stories, we get a sense of the world as a village, where everyone is connected and everyone is affected. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer this to a world in which people are reduced to … information.

Which is why, despite the terrible toll, the number 4,000 can breed a modicum of hope – the world can be a brutal place, but we can make it less so, with our eyes, our hearts, our voices and our platform—Orato.com.