1 post tagged “brave time”
Tell us about a time when you were brave.
Submitted by Hops.
In 1999 I was living in Thailand with my family at a place called Sanpatong in the North of Thailand. I had been living in Thailand since 1990 and worked managing a camera lens factory in Lumphun. About 120 meters behind our house was a fruit factory that was owned by a Taiwanese company. They had been maturing fruit with the use of hundreds of tons of fertilizes and this exploded when somebody dropped a cigarette butt where they should not have been smoking. The explosion was felt 8kms away, levelled over 400 houses and caused damage to buildings up to a 5km radius. Over 40 people were killed and hundreds injured. We lost most of the house and the children were slightly injured but we later found out that we were lucky because a Temple that was between us and the factory blocked some of the blast.
After the explosion occurred I got my family to a sport oval near the house for evacuation and medical attention and was then told that there would probably be more explosions because of the stored fertilizer. Myself and my neighbours decided to go back anyway as there were still many people injured and unaccounted for. We worked all that day helping rescue services and for the next week while my wife and kids were with our relatives I stood watch over the remains of our house to deter looters and tour buses from Bangkok that arrived every 10 minutes..
In August 2000 I returned to Australia after nearly 11 years to make a new home. Missing a train bombing in 1989, taking cover under a car in Sanam Luang from gunfire during the coup in 1992, evacuating from shellfire while working near the Burmese border, a serious road accident for my son in 1994, Dengue fever in 1998 and finally the explosion was enough to send me back to Australia from my wife's home country and a place that I had at the time spent about a third of my life.
You can be brave when you are single but that changes with family responsibilities. We still visit every few years or so and will eventually retire there.
