When Infidelities Surface

When you dig deep enough! Thirty-miners trapped for 69 days, momentarily thought to have perished. With hundreds of millions of viewers glued to the tube, the snail-paced capsule, ascending and descending down 2,300 feet into an inhospitable cavern deep beneath the earth sunk to supply copper for who knows what “re-volting” process… returned one-by-one to life atop of the earth’s crust. Wives, children, friends and other relatives suppressed tears until the salty water flowed anyway. The President, a Minister, mine officials all gathered for the photo opps. Cash rewards, offers for interviews, story rights flourished. What’s mine is mine unless you are a miner.

The less heralded side of this amazing and heart-warming rescue is the manifestation of love that conflicted in the background, and of course, it takes a British tabloid to point this “difficulty” out:, in this interesting headline from September 2^nd: “Mistresses and wives clash over trapped Chilean miners” screamed Telegraph.co.uk. As medical technicians and psychologists gathered to sort out the clear and obvious results of this two month plus claustrophobic confinement, surface tensions of another variety added to the drama, simmering even hotter when miners were asked to name their beneficiaries: “‘There has been a lot of conflict between women,’ admitted Marta Flores a Red Cross worker a t the makeshift camp where relatives wait for news of their loved ones.

“‘We had a big bust up in the canteen tent when a wife came across a woman who claimed to be her husband's lover – we had to step in and pull them apart before things got physical.’ At stake are welfare packages issued to the families of the trapped miners as well as future compensation claims that could run into tens of thousands of pounds [hey, it’s a British rag!]… ‘Unfortunately the conflict stems from money issues,’ said Mrs Flores. ‘Some of the men have children from numerous women and all of them have arrived here to stake their claim. I've met five families in this situation but I'm sure there are more.’ Some women turned up at the camp to discover that their partners already had a wife and children who they knew nothing about… ‘Those that truly love their men have slipped away quietly not wanting to cause any more pain to the families but others are putting up a fight.’ Special welfare officers trained in marital issues have been brought in to provide help to women faced with their husband's infidelity.” Telegraph.

The watchful eye of big media, the ubiquitous ability of Internet search, social networking, and electronic communications… mixed with the plain and obvious behavior of human beings dealing with stress and greed… can turn heroes into dogs, athletic champions into malfunctioning targets of a malevolent press that sells content more from bad news and negative stories than the positive and uplifting moments of humanity. We seem to love to find fault, to explore the crevices of human frailty; we seem to thrive on making judgments of others. But in the end, these accidental heroes have shown the endurance of human beings in exceptionally difficult circumstances. Perhaps that is the way we need to view them all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and being human is the story of imperfection.