303 Taken, 27 Violations, One World

Today I woke up in too many places at once, feeling myself stretched across front lines, floodplains, courtrooms, polluted skies, and neon-lit streets.

In Gaza, a six-week-old ceasefire was supposed to mean quiet, but I watched a car in the Remal neighbourhood of Gaza City become a fireball under a drone's camera; eleven people died in that one blast and around twenty more were injured, and by nightfall at least 24 Palestinians were dead and 87 wounded from a wave of Israeli air attacks on cars, homes, and shelters in Gaza City, Deir el-Balah, and the Nuseirat refugee camp, 27 violations of the ceasefire in a single day and 497 since October 10, with 342 civilians killed during this so-called truce, most of them children, women, and the elderly.

In Dhaka, I felt the ground carry yesterday's fear; a magnitude 5.5 earthquake near the capital had already cracked walls and toppled roofs, sending people pouring into the alleys in panic, and at 10:36 in the morning today a 3.3 aftershock rippled through Ashulia just north of the city, adding fractures to buildings and nerves alike, leaving officials counting 10 dead and a few hundred injured, some hurt by falling masonry, others by the stampedes to get outside.

In central Vietnam, I tasted floodwater as a week of torrential rain, nearly 1,900 millimetres in some districts, turned coffee farms and beach towns into a chain of brown lakes, and by evening officials were reporting 55 people dead and 13 missing across the region, almost half of them in Dak Lak province, with more than 235,000 homes flooded, about 80,000 hectares of crops destroyed, and economic damage estimated at roughly 8.98 trillion dong, around the price of another future sacrificed to bad weather made worse by my own emissions.

In Tehran, I coughed with myself as the air quality index pushed past 200 into the very unhealthy range, fine dust and exhaust thick enough to blur the Alborz mountains, and by afternoon the city ranked among the most polluted in the world while nine million of my lungs tried to work through smog trapped by a winter inversion, children kept indoors and parents refreshing apps in the hope that the sky might turn from toxic grey to something merely dull.

In Papiri, in Niger State in Nigeria, I counted children and came up short when armed men who had stormed St. Mary's Catholic boarding school in the pre-dawn dark were found to have taken 303 students and 12 teachers, children as young as seven pushed into the bush at gunpoint, and in neighbouring Kebbi earlier in the week another 25 girls had been seized from their school, one of them escaping while 24 remained missing, so today parents walked through dormitories lined with empty bunks carrying photographs, asking anyone who would listen whether the kidnappers had called.

Because of those vanished children, one of my leaders stayed home; Nigeria's president canceled his trip to the first G20 summit ever held on African soil and sent his vice president instead to Johannesburg, where the empty space he left in the family photo was mirrored by another gap where the United States should have stood after boycotting the meeting over claims that South Africa mistreats its white minority.

Inside the Johannesburg conference centre, I watched the remaining leaders adopt a 122-point declaration promising more help for poorer countries battered by climate disasters, heavy debt, and the costs of shifting away from fossil fuels, and in side rooms I listened as European, Canadian, Japanese, and other officials picked apart a 28-point American plan to end Russia's war in Ukraine, a proposal that would force Kyiv to give up occupied territory, accept limits on its army, and renounce forever the possibility of joining NATO, a plan they called a basis for talks but warned could not be allowed to reward the redrawing of borders by force.

From elsewhere, I saw one of my faces, the president of Ukraine, post that his team would meet United States officials in Switzerland tomorrow to keep talking through the proposal even as artillery still cracked along the Donetsk front and drones whined overhead, and I heard the American president set a Thursday deadline for acceptance before backtracking and calling his peace terms a work in progress, leaving me caught between clocks and artillery schedules.

Far away in Brasília, another of my older democracies put one of its former leaders in a smaller room when Brazil's Supreme Court, citing footage of him burning his electronic ankle tag with a soldering iron and rumors of a planned escape, revoked the house arrest of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro as he appealed a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after the 2022 election and ordered him into federal police custody, his supporters praying and chanting outside his gated community while critics opened bottles of sparkling wine outside the police building to celebrate that he was finally behind bars.

On the coast of Japan in Niigata Prefecture, I watched a governor stand at a podium and quietly move part of my energy system back toward the atom by approving the partial restart of the vast Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, authorizing reactors 6 and 7 to come back online for the first time since the Fukushima disaster era, together capable of generating 2,710 megawatts and promising cheaper, low-carbon electricity even as some of my memories recoiled at the thought of seawater surging over a seawall in 2011.

Under the neon of the Las Vegas Strip, I let myself play while Formula 1 cars screamed along a temporary street circuit for the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend, and in a rain-hit, red-flag-broken qualifying session Lando Norris hustled his McLaren around the slick corners to claim pole position with a 1:47.934 lap, with Max Verstappen lining up alongside him on the front row as fans in papaya orange and championship red yelled themselves hoarse while, a few hundred metres away inside the casinos, dealers quietly kept shuffling cards.

Across the continent at the Prudential Center in Newark, I turned violence into choreography at the AEW Full Gear pay-per-view, where Samoa Joe beat Hangman Adam Page inside a steel cage to take the AEW World Championship, Kris Statlander pinned Mercedes Mone to retain the AEW Women's World Championship, Mark Briscoe fought through a no-disqualification brawl to win the TNT title, and Ricochet survived a chaotic Casino Gauntlet to become the first AEW National Champion, thousands of my throats roaring while everyone knew they were meant to stand up again by the end of the night.

Away from the cameras, I watched a young man in Gaza draft new chapters of a book about his city's destruction and stubbornness even as fresh rubble fell nearby, saw doctors in Dhaka inspect cracked hospital walls after the aftershock while triaging patients, noticed volunteers in Vietnam ladling rice and fish sauce into bowls for families sleeping on classroom floors, and sat through the long sleepless night with parents in Papiri who waited for a phone call that did not come.

As this day closes, I feel like a single nervous system lit up in too many places, I am the tremor in a woman's hands in Dhaka as she hangs her children's clothes and the ground begins to move, the soot in a Tehran child's lungs, the mud pulling at a farmer's legs in Dak Lak, the empty bunk in a Nigerian dormitory, the smoke rising from a Gaza apartment with its top floor missing, and at the same time I am the roar of a crowd when a wrestler lifts a championship belt, the gasp when a driver saves a sliding car millimetres from a concrete wall, and the careful stroke of a pen in a refugee camp as one more storyteller tries to make sense of me, still hoping that one day my diary entries will read less like casualty reports and more like a record of how I finally learned to take care of myself.