Nightmare still stays, Doung Rudee starts new life at therapy center
This is the story I have writen when I participated in a Journalism training program organized by an Indochina Media Memorial Foundation from June to July. I had visited many places. One of them is the Saori Center, a weaving place to help women particularly those who are Tsunami victim.
BANG MUANG, THAILAND—Wearing a yellow T-shirt with a white hat, 28 year-old, Doung Rudee is sewing a bag carefully. She smiles and looks very happy but no one know that she is still carrying a nightmare of the massive wave flooding her grandmother away.
Doung Rudee has been working at the Saori Weaving Center, Bang Muang district, Phang Nga, for two years. This center was set up by a Japanese Buddhist monk named Acharn Mitsuo Gavesako on February 2005, two months after the Dec 2004 tsunami. The Saori project provides weaving skills, and aims as an occupational therapy for people who suffering from tsunami.
A coordinator of the Khao Lak Saori project, Srirat Wiratcharassin, says Saori is one of the centers opened to help employing the Tsunami victims.
The dark grey color and the same style of weaving were done by most of the Tsunami victims working at the center. They keep doing the same thing though they were recommended to change. They are normal villagers, they don’t have an artistic idea on how to make the weaving more interesting, says Srirat.
The Saori center provides free lunch for all the workers. Each of the 30 employees receives 160 baht a day. If they do extra work and make more products, the center will pay them more money based on number of pieces, says Srirat.
For Doung, she says while putting her right hand under her chin, “the salary is not enough but I can do extra work at home and get extra money,” she stops for a moment and continues with a bit smile, “I don’t like this job but I have no choice.”
Weaving is partial nightmare treatment besides an hour everyday spending on meditation. The two treated strategies are helpful for the victims to release their emotional distress but not for Doung.
Before three months of the destructive wave, she happily worked as a cashier at a resort in Baan Nam Khem, the village that hit the most by the Tsunami. She says she could earn more money at the resort than at the Saori center. Her happiness was sent away by the killer wave known as Tsunami. The total death toll of the six affected southern provinces is 5,395, based on the United Nation Office of the Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery.
Doung said when she heard people shouting, she came out of her house, which was about 70 meters from the seashore in Baan Nam Khem. The big wave was coming, Doung quickly run back home because she has two sons and a grandmother waiting her at home.
Carrying an 8 years old son on one hand, and another hand with a little 1 year old son, Doung could not bring her grandmother who was not able to walk. If she decided to take her grandmother, no one would survive.
“I know she wants to say something but she couldn’t,” Doung recalls while changing her mood and bending her face down. “I left my house and went with my two little sons, she (her grandmother) just looks at me with smile,” she adds with tear inside her eyes.
Doung ran with two of her three sons in hands across the main road. Many cars, hotels, houses, and restaurants were moving and destroying by the wave. She decided not to go further as she could not run because the wave flowing her up already. She was fortunate to catch the balcony at the second floor of a building. She tried to send her eldest son up to the roof to be safe.
“My son was nearly lost. I could touch only his fingertip,” says Doung with smile. She stops for a while but keeps smiling with white teeth and continues “I hold my other son in between my legs. I did not know how I could do that.”
After the water flowed down to the seashore, she came back to her house but everything was destroyed. She, then, was very hopeless. She assumed her grandmother died because she could not find her, and her second son who went out with her cousin might be killed by the wave.
While walking along the road in the village, the villagers told her that her second son was safe. Her life is bright up since hearing that.
After tsunami, the hotel she worked for was destroyed. “I decided to work here (the Saori center) base on my friend’s recommendation,” says Doung while putting her right hand on the bag made of a green, yellow and red woof—a material used for weaving—near the weaving machine. She is now staying at the temporary house in ITV village—this village is raised by the former ITV station—with her younger brother and two sons.
Most of the weaving ladies at the center are unskilled including Doung. When they come to work at the center, they start to learn from each other. They can make clothes, bags, or flag by freely weaving woof.
“I don’t know how to do it (bag), I learn from her,” Doung says moving her head to the left hand side and pointing to another lady named Suda.
Suda, a 45 year-old lady with glasses, said while sewing a stripe red and yellow bag she wants to help training other unskilled women for two or three years. Working at the weaving center is not her goal. “If I have enough money, I will extent my rubber plantation,” she stops sewing and claims.
All the weaving products at Saori center is sold to Phuket, Samu and Maya Gotami Foundation—the initial funding of the center. “The situation of the marketing is better in high season,” says Srirat, Saori co-ordianator, “I want the products to be sold out more because there are many workers here.”
Many weavers depend on this job for their living including Doung. Though the salary at the center is not enough, Doung is still trying to work as hard as she can to earn money to support her three sons and a younger brother. However, working at the weaving center is just her temporary goal. She cannot forget the time she worked as a cashier at a hotel.
With a smile, Doung Rudee says, it is low season, she will go back to work at that resort—the resort was rebuilt after the Tsunami—in high season.
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