Learn to Treasure

People in this world experience birth, ageing, sickness and death. When I was little, I could not know how these influence people and understand the feelings of people who encounter that. With the growing of my age, I gradually met some of these processes which happened to others’ lives. Like last year, one of my friends got pneumonia and was hospitalized for about one week. He was painful which showed clearly on his face and he kept coughing when he tried to speak. I could not do anything, but just provided him accompanies. And that was all that I could do. I felt angry that I could not feel the pain for him.
It’s really depressed when people who I care much about getting in trouble but I cannot do anything for them. And it also makes me bad when other sorrowful events happened around, even if I don’t know the victims. However, there are many pieces of bad news on TV recently. Most of these incidents are about people getting sick or injuries and people passing away. One of them is the severe flood this summer.
August the eighth in every year is a holiday for our fathers. The day of this year was originally supposed to be the same as usual, but there was a typhoon destroyed this beautiful holiday and separated many families. During the whole August, journalists on TV kept reporting the scenes and the condition of the disaster to inform all people in Taiwan how miserable they were. Every time I saw that I couldn’t help but cry for the victims as well as those who came to rescue them but died or got hurt.
The typhoon influenced Taitung County so much where I went to teach children this summer; hence I worried a lot for our kids. Fortunately, they were safe and they lived in a distance from the flood. Although it was indeed the best new, I still felt grief for children in other areas. Those naïve children should not have showed such worried expressions on their faces, but they did because they had no houses to live anymore. In addition, the schools were also broken down by the typhoon which led to the difficulty of studying for kids. The adults were on the list of victims that they would have no work to do for a period and this resulted in the financial problems to their families. These two I think are the most critical issues for the government to deal with carefully.
Actually, that’s not the worst thing for those families. There were some people who were not rescued out dead at their home, or some of them even have not been found now. The dreams of reunion for the rest families alive in the world are impossible to become real, which the pain is pretty much difficult to bear and that’s what we who are safe from the calamity cannot imagine.
Ever since I had memory, my mom has been keeping telling me that we should cherish everything we have, including our lives. I learn this lesson a lot this year and it brings me to be grateful every time I think of it.