PACIFIC VIEWPOINT By Gray Clapham CI News Regional Editor

The Fiji islands are reeling in disarray in the wake of a severe tropical cyclone – hundreds of homes have been destroyed, thousands are homeless and 42 families are mourning their dead and two are still searching for their missing loved ones.

In some villages it would seem like the day of the apocalypse has been and gone. People’s lives will be changed for ever. Children will be traumatised. The savage, impersonal horror of nature unleashed will remain forever imprinted on their minds.

Elsewhere the world goes on.

The world media, so focused on events in Europe, the Middle East and the United States have new, more compelling issues to report.

As Vinesh Naidu of Rakiraki attempts to protect his homeless family in an evacuation centre, his hand wrapped in a bandage where he lost his fingers to a slamming door at the height of the storm, the world is once again obsessed with the Oscars, the US presidential elections, the ceasefire in Syria.

Apart for Australia’s ABC and New Zealand’s Radio New Zealand, few news agencies outside of the region remain that interested in the details of the aftermath of Cyclone Winston which slammed Fiji as a category five storm on February 20 – only nine days ago.

It is a sad but inevitable fact of life that the world pauses only briefly to observe such earth-shattering tragedies that mark the march of human time. Within days, if not hours, new and immediate urgencies appear and those who are still reeling in a world of chaos and pain on some remote Pacific island, are left behind.

News coverage of a cyclone is predictable and in many ways unique. The threat exists long before the event. It does not come with a breaking news horror headline of an earthquake, a tsunami or a mass killing.

With a cyclone, there is time to build up the suspense with headlines predicting potential death and destruction from what is a slow moving, and unpredictable menace.

Then there is the moment of impact, which for obvious reasons is seldom recorded in real time. People are too busy surviving to be out taking photographs. Communications are wiped out, so no one is actually able to report from the “eye of the storm”.

When you pick up your Saturday daily morning newspaper and read the headline, Fiji Islands Brace For Megastorm, the bracing is already over and the megastorm is right now doing its damage. Monday’s paper then reports, Massive Storm Damage in Fiji.

There’s a 48 hour gap, a live-news vacuum during the immediate moments of the impact of the cyclone hitting populated islands and the calamitous first few hours that follow as the storm violently churns across a nation and then exits without apology into open ocean on the other side.

For the first two or three days its a media frenzy as pictures come to hand of unbelievable damage, the death toll is updated, the cost of the damage assessed, the stories of death and survival emerge.

These reports are given with gravity and urgency – each news site attempting to find a new headline on which to hang their particular portrait of mayhem.

Then, on about day four, the stories become all about of the relief efforts, the foreign aid promised, delivered or, inevitably, not delivered.

About this time, a spate of finger-pointing takes place as disgruntled aid officials provide inevitable criticism of bureaucratic inadequacies and the slowness of the relief processes.

After nine days the stories are already diminishing in their “wow’ factor.

New Zealand’s Murray McCully visiting Fiji to get a first hand look at the damage, schools used as evacuation centres reopening, more aid on the way – are stories now far removed from the world media’s front pages.

In Fiji however, on the ground, local media continues to unearth fascinating stories of bravery, survival and sadness – but these stories don’t make it much further than the local newsstands and websites.

The Fiji Times reports on the story of a four-month-old baby who was recovered unscathed in his bathtub, tucked under a sideboard, as his family’s house collapsed in the storm.

Another story, tells of nine children aged from one to 10 shut in a cupboard for three hours as Winston passed over a village, shredding houses.

These are among many tales from people who still can’t believe they survived the destructive winds and flying debris.

Then there are sad stories of those who didn’t make it – like that of a 24-year-old farmer, who carried a woman, her three children and another girl to the safest house in their village.

Later that night he was killed trying to save others. He had to be buried quickly and villagers are now sad that they didn’t have time to afford him a true hero’s funeral. (See full story this page.)

These are just a few of the hundreds of stories that are emerging from the communities that have been changed forever by a single storm, albeit the most severe ever experienced in the Southern Hemisphere – stories that will become local folklore as the years march on and Winston is relegated to its place on the Pacific region’s history.

The world will forget, but those who survived and those who have buried their dead, will always mark February 20, 2016, as the day Winston came and turned their lives upside down.

- GC