airlai.com  ericlai.com

After months of planning, my trip was just a day away.

The date? Sunday, December 26, 2004. The destination? Thailand.

That morning, I woke up to the horrifying images on TV: hotels being washed out to sea, cars riding waves into buildings.

The caption stunned me. All this was happening in Phuket. Seven days later, I would have been there. Now, untold thousands were dead.

Little did I know that, across Southeast Asia, those untold thousands would soon top 200,000. Little had I anticipated I would be visiting a region in the midst of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

One month ago today, I completed a 26-hour, 8,500-mile journey and arrived at Bangkok International Airport. Large television monitors broadcast images similar to those I'd seen at home. Outside, flags at half-mast dotted the smoggy skyline.

The disparities we see in the United States are even more striking across the Pacific. They are evident in the daily lives of working class Thai families, who scrape by trying to make a living while highrises and megamalls sprout up around them. I've been to the Mall of America, but I've never seen nicer malls than those in Thailand.

During my ten-day trip, locals continually groused over the selfishness of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a multibillionaire who refuses to donate even a penny to tsunami relief in his own country and yet, on December 30th, was named Thai Man of the Year.

At Thai gas stations -- all full-service -- attendants give you two free bottles of water just for getting gas, even if you don't fill up your whole tank. It was ironic to be receiving free water when, not 500 miles away, thousands of fractured families were homeless without anything to drink.

Ten days is insufficient time to truly experience any new country, let alone a continent you haven't visited since infancy. It was enough, however, to give me the sense that -- whether trapped by the tsunami's devastation or by the burden of harsh economic circumstances -- life in a developing country is fragile. And no lives are more fragile than those of the poor, who by far suffered the greatest toll in the tsunami's wake.

My original destination -- a hotel in Phuket -- was swept away in the waves. My friend Avishek, a classmate in the School of Public Health and my tour guide in Thailand, says "it just wasn't our time," but it's hard to say that it was time for the 280,000 people who died on December 26th.

We have it so good here in California, yet we rarely realize it; Bangkok, after all, showed me that Los Angeles actually doesn't have the worst traffic and pollution in the world.

We are all fortunate to be alive, working and studying in a place with so much opportunity. We can and should honor those who are not so fortunate -- by making concerted efforts, at home and abroad, to reduce the disparities that trap them.

Eric Lai is a second-year master's student at the UCLA School of Public Health.