Relief workers recall tsunami

Two residents of Downeast Maine have recently returned from Thailand, where they were volunteering with efforts aimed at repairing the damage wrought by the tsunami that struck last Christmas. Both were enjoying their end-of-summer Downeast, and both were struck by the parallels between the tsunami disaster and the ravages visited on the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina a week ago.

Carol Harrington is an ob/gyn from the Washington, D.C., area who has a summer place in Cutler. She, her husband and children spent most of the month of July in Thailand, working with a group called Smile on Wings to provide health care to people affected by the tsunami and to others in small, isolated villages in the north of the country. Smile on Wings is a group founded by a relative of the last king of Thailand, a dentist named Una Bunnag, to provide dental care in Thailand with the help of volunteers from the United States and elsewhere. After the devastating storm of last Christmas, she expanded the mission of the group to provide more general medical and health care as well.

After arriving in country, Dr. Harrington, along with interpreters from the Ministry of Health and other doctors, traveled north to the border area of the country along the Salawan River. They travelled in longboats up the river, a two-hour journey. She landed in a village of about 200 people with conditions Harrington describes as being "like the 1700s. They had basic sanitation, separating drinking water, washing and waste disposal." Along with a doctor and dentist from the provincial hospital, they were able to see about 18 people per day. "I was worried because I wasn't really familiar with the diseases you see there C malaria, TB, AIDS C but one of the local doctors told me I would get familiar quickly." She treated many patients with drug-resistant strains of malaria and other tropical fevers.

The family stayed in a small hut, sleeping on the floor, in temperatures averaging 95 degrees. "For me, the heat was pretty tough C not something I was used to." Just across the river, she could see men dressed in fatigues and armed with machine guns. She and her party had no problems but admitted that the sight of the Myanmar soldiers was "kind of scary." Their group had brought a large, metal boat for the village, to provide more reliable transportation to the provincial hospital when needed. Because of the tensions of the border area, the boat had to be guarded night and day so that it was not taken by raiders from Myanmar. Another complicating factor in the border area was the Karon people. The Karon follow the old tribal borders, rather than the modern, political ones and would swim the river from Myanmar into Thailand, and wind up in refugee camps there.

Harrington praised the Thai government for its attempts to help out in the border area, mentioning an innovative program to aid communications. Small solar cells were set up in the village for power so that medical and other emergencies could be communicated to the provincial hospital and authorities in times of crisis.

Harrington and her family returned to Phuket in the monsoon season, which sees drenching rainfall for about two hours every day. Even though it had been six months since the tsunami hit the city, there were still ships thrown up on the land a mile away from the ocean, and she saw a 20,000-ton boat smashed into and nearly through a house in town. The people of the area were suffering in large numbers from post-traumatic stress; every family suffered losses of children, parents or other relatives.

A large part of the healing work was devoted to listening to the people talk about those losses. "They liked to talk to the health workers about their tragedies. Everyone in the community had suffered such trauma, it was hard to talk to friends and neighbors about their problems." Most of the area had been cleaned up, but there was a fear that tourists, the only basis for the local economy, would not return. "That was the most egregious fear. We were staying in a 400-room resort, but there were only 55 people in it, all aid workers. There is no other industry there; fishing is a subsistence activity, not an industry," notes Harrington. She said that the aid that had immediately followed the disaster had largely dried up. Private groups like Habitat for Humanity and a Seventh Day Adventist church group were building houses, along with the Thai military.

Harrington says that donations made through the Smile on Wings program go completely toward providing medical supplies and equipment. She and the other doctors all paid their own way for the trip. Her hospital, Holy Cross Hospital in Gaithersburg, Md., donated $5,000 worth of supplies which she took with her. She notes that the Thai Ministry of Health was doing a good job of channelling donations and money to areas most in need.

An eyewitness to the tsunami
Davis Pike of Lubec has a different perspective on the tsunami tragedy. Pike grew up in Lubec and spends part of the year there, but he was in Thailand when the disaster struck. He went to Thailand as a student in 1961 and started working there in 1970.

He reports that he was on the beach at the time of the earthquake, about 8 a.m. local time, and he saw the waves two hours later. After the shock of the strong earthquake, no one expected the tsunami that would follow. The waves reached a height of 30 feet in some parts of Thailand, though where he was they were about 15 feet. He recalls that there was one large wave initially, followed in about 15 minutes by two more waves. "I had gone to the beach where my children wanted to go. If we had gone where I wanted that day, we wouldn't have survived." When he heard other people along the beach screaming, he and his children ran up off the beach, to safety on higher ground.

The amount of damage was varied, depending on the topography of the land, the shape of the underlying land on the ocean bottom near shore and other factors. In some areas, damage extended only a few hundred yards inland, and many people were able to flee to safety. In other areas, especially some of the remote areas developed for wealthy tour groups, the beach areas were backed by cliffs and were struck by much larger waves, and when the waves came pounding ashore there was no possible escape.

Pike worked with recovery efforts on a local island, which he says is still not entirely cleaned up. For the most part, this is because it is difficult to transport to the islands heavy equipment like bulldozers that would speed the work now being done almost entirely by hand.

Pike returned to his village in March, living in one of the buildings remaining with an intact roof. Although he brought mosquito netting and clothing, he found that at one point he had over 250 mosquito bites on each ankle. There were only about 10 people there working, and in the heat it was slow going. They would eat outdoors, clearing debris and burning it and garbage. He says that it was a situation where "you had to help yourself," getting as much done by hand as possible without equipment.

Many of the people in the area have become almost permanent refugees, according to Pike, afraid to return and rebuild their former homes for fear of another tsunami sweeping in. One village voted not to return, for fear of another disaster. Some of the main tourist areas have now been rebuilt, but the people will have to wait until November to see whether the tourists will return. Phuket and the surrounding resorts are largely occupied by Scandinavian and other European tourists, and the season begins after the monsoons end.

Comparisons to Katrina
Both Carol Harrington and Davis Pike see parallels between the disaster half a world away in Thailand and the recent deluge in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Pike felt that, in some ways, it was worse in the Katrina disaster. "In Thailand, there was good access to most areas, many roads were intact. There was still electric service within a few miles of the beach." He thought it would be a harder and much longer process to reclaim and restore the devastated New Orleans.

Pike saw the relief efforts first hand, and knows the country well. He praises CARE, the Red Cross and the King's Charities especially, adding that anyone who donates can "be sure that their money is spent quite well."