JINDO, South Korea — The mother, slightly drunk, sits on the edge of a windblown dock and wails. A Buddhist monk approaches and wipes the tears from her face as she pours out her grief and longing for her missing son. He leads her away from the dock’s edge and, as she weeps, chants Buddhist scriptures and sounds a wooden gong in a prayer for her son’s return.
“They are really suffering,” said the monk, Bul Il, who came from the southeastern port city of Busan to help the families of the more than 100 still missing in the sunken South Korean ferry. “It’s painful for me to watch their misery,” he said, his face peeling and red from long chants on a platform facing the sea.
Bul Il is one member of an impromptu city that has sprung up at this normally sleepy port for the families of those lost in the disaster. The city runs on the kindness of strangers.
A sense of national mourning over a tragedy that will likely result in more than 300 deaths, most of them high school students, has prompted an outpouring of volunteers. More than 16,000 people — about half the island’s normal population — have come to help.