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It is staggering to think that elephants sought higher ground immediately before the Tsunami hit Asian shores on December 26th the year before last, while no advanced technology existed in the form of an early warning detection system that could prevent the loss of human life … or so said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism of Sri Lanka. I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t there. I was safe and dry in my apartment in Varese, Italy, at the time.

I was recently honored to be one of the many panelists at the International Institute for Peace Through Tourism Global Summit in Pattaya, Thailand, an organizational conference dedicated to exploring the ways in which tourism can and does promote peace. I was one
of the only westerners there and was surrounded by Ministers, Members of Parliament and others dedicated to the concept of sustainable tourism and peaceful tourism.

While I had been speaking about the strategies that western tourism enterprise has utilized to confront terrorism and natural disaster in the U.S. and Europe over the past few years, my fellow panelists from Sri Lanka, Uganda, Cambodia and South Africa, to name a few, have been discussing the ways in which terrorism, internal armed-conflict, war and poverty have affected their lives and those of their families and countrymen. Among a group of co-panelists at breakfast one morning, I was the only person to not have held the status of refugee at some point in my life. To the extent I have changed houses or homeland, it has been entirely through choice and a quest for new experience and I know nothing of fleeing for my life or the lives of my children. My colleagues from across the sea, in contrast, have been counting the years, and in some instances, the months, days, hours and minutes of peace.

It is amazing to me that the more I am exposed to through travel and interaction with peoples of other countries, the more ignorant I feel. I have always known, through basic channels of international media, that people living in other parts of the world do not share the same standard of living that I do, but I did not know that the single greatest killer of children world-wide is unclean water. I did not know that my colleagues in Jordan get water once a week, but that my female Jordanian colleagues have virtually no 'glass ceiling' that prevents them from advancing professionally. I didn’t know that there are still cold-storage containers on the shores of the Andaman coast in Thailand that contain the bodies of unidentified loved ones after the wave hit and I didn’t know that police boats and huge fishing trawlers still lie kilometers from the sea where they lie against buildings, but otherwise upright, as if they are simply dry-docked in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What is sustainable tourism and how can we in the western world assist our brothers and sisters in less developed areas to tackle problems that affect fragile economies so dependent upon tourism? And how can we, as tourists, promote peace when we travel? So many of us, as individuals as well as public and private enterprise, donate money. Is that the way to assure that families and businesses post traumatic natural or terrorism-related episode continue to survive?