Lamma Island, Hong Kong (CNN) -- When my neighbor Jane Wilbor got on a Lamma ferry Tuesday, she did something she'd never done before with her three young children: She put on life preservers. "I wanted to show them how to get one out and put one on," said Wilbor, whose three children -- Louie, 10, James, 9, and 7-year-old Eddie -- are playmates with my son 4-year-old son, Jonah, in Pak Kok, a small village of a few dozen families on Lamma Island, one of hundreds of islands that make up Hong Kong. Our village was awoken by the sound of helicopters Monday night, as searchlights trained on the sea until the sunlight broke the next morning on a capsized boat just a few hundred meters offshore.
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The tragic boat collision that killed 38 people has rocked the island community of Lamma
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The island is home to about 5,000 people a half hour ferry ride from Hong Kong Island
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The waters around Hong Kong have some of the busiest boat traffic in the world
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Ferries carry 135,600 people each day around Hong Kong's major islands
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Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
The ferry collision that left at least 38 dead -- including five children --is not an abstraction for those who live on Lamma, but a tragedy that puts the spotlight on an elemental part of our lives and the economic livelihood of @placeholder: The busy waterways and the boats that connect the city.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
The fortunes of @placeholder were built on its deep-water ports, and its seas are still among the hardest working waters in the world.
Lamma Island
Lamma
Lamma Island
Lamma
The ferries create a strange familiarity, people I think of as "ferry phantoms" -- strangers whose faces you know only from sharing the @placeholder ferries -- and yet when your paths cross in the city, your instinct is to wave hello.
Lamma Island
Lamma
Lamma Island
Lamma
So the degrees of separation from the tragedy are few to @placeholder residents.