Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand Dec / Jan 2017: Special Edition | Page 24

Health & Wellness
FROM THE ASHES OF DISASTER, Vol. 1

SMILE FOR HAPPINESS
After one year of sharing tips in Wanderlust’s “Happiness Toolkit” column, Amelie
now imparts the personal growth lessons gleaned from her extensive experience
in war zones and countries hit by natural disasters with her new column, “From
the Ashes of Disaster.” In this first installment, read about the power of a smile.
by Amelie Yan-Gouiffes

I

n 1999, an earthquake devastated the coffee region of Colombia,
particularly destroying a prosperous town called Armenia.
After one year working in former
Yugoslavia, I was on my second humanitarian mission, this time with
the Red Cross. I arrived on the disaster scene in Armenia where not
a single house remained. People
were living on the same plots of land
where their homes once stood—but
their houses no longer existed. All
that endured were memories of former lives and a heavy, mournful fog.
In the midst of this fog, I saw a
woman surrounded by rubble. She
called out to me so I walked toward

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her, trying to find the right words to
say in the aftermath of this disaster.
She smiled at me—a big, broad, radiant smile—and then offered to make
me some coffee.
The woman rummaged for a hunk
of brick upon which I could sit. I sat
down, and she picked up a chipped
cup missing a handle and a dark
brown sock. Then she filled the sock
with coffee.
In that moment, the only thing I
could think of was the sock. Brown
was not likely to be its original color.
My guess was that it had been white
in the past, so where had this brown
come from? Coffee? Soil? Had it been
used on a foot? It was, after all, not

even two days after a major earthquake. There’s no way the sock now
involved in coffee preparation could
possibly have been a clean sock.
The woman warmed water on
a little fire. It warmed quickly. She
poured water in the sock over my
piece of cup; and, yes, I could see that
the questionably tinged sock made
for a convenient organic filter. Sure.
But I was in Armenia to assess where
our team could install the water
tanks, which meant there was not yet
safe drinking water in the area!
As this smiling woman prepared
her offering for me, I knew I was
about to drink the first non-potable
coffee of my life. (Turns out that it

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