Tsunami heroes
I worked in the tsunami affected part of
I spent my first 50 sleepless hours in Phuket and went to Krabi on the morning of 28 February. The Hospital was the centre of activity. Beds stacked two and three deep in every available space. The Hospital entrance was like a mad house at first. So many people milling around, trying to help, or searching for missing friends and relatives. Hundreds of Thai and farang victims and volunteers helping out.
I set down to work and went to buy some basic necessities like pens and paper, only to be told that I needn’t pay. Helping was payment enough. A Thai company lent me a mobile phone to use while I was working there. A group of back-packers had set up a missing persons data base, which anyone could enter information into, and which proved invaluable in tracking down people at the hospital. Anyone who had a skill was using it. Holidaying Doctors and psychologists were helping out, running busily between wards. A buddy system had been set up, where uninjured victims of the wave would befriend and sit with people who had lost touch with their friends and loved ones.
In the cramped wards, victims had boxes of food piled up beside their beds, more than they could eat - the donations of food from local Thai families were so great. At some point I sat outside the hospital for a smoke and was approached by a Thai family, husband, wife and two adorable children. The youngest daughter approached me clutching a bag of food as a donation, judging from my disheveled appearance that I too must have been a victim. The gesture was so touching that I wept. At the hospital, town hall and at local receiving hotels, telephone calls and internet connections were free. People were also donating clothing – many of the victims had been left with nothing except their swimsuits after the wave.
Everytime I walked out of the entrance to the hospital a new pick up truck would have arrived with supplies of food and medical necessities. Boy and girl scouts trooped in, dressed smartly in their uniforms, to do whatever they could to help. Or nurses from neighbouring hospitals would arrive in a large truck, with their different style uniforms, ready to plug in and replace the tired local staff who had been working all the hours god sent.
And every plane that could be mustered, from Thai Airways and the Royal Thai Air Force shuttled back and forth constantly, evacuating victims to the much larger receiving centres in Bangkok and Phuket. The German Air Force sent a 32 bed intensive care Airbus. Many other countries sent planes to help. We knew in Krabi that if there was space to send victims ‘flat’ (i.e. on a stretcher) it normally meant that they would be on a Royal Thai Airforce C130. Sometimes we would hear about a plane that had 32 seats. It was only later that I discovered that this was actually an old Thai Airforce DC3. Any plane that could fly was used! And it was amazing.
At the local Chinese temples bodies were being collected. Around 400 when I first arrived. There was insufficient refrigeration in the first few days but people were doing their best to store the bodies as well as possible and make sure they were properly labeled and photographed to assist later identification.
Many volunteers offered to help with the body collection effort, which was the most terrible and saddening of work. And then the forensic experts set to work on their complex task of body identification, from Doctor Porntip’s Thai Forensic Institute to over 20 International Teams. The local task in country was a necessary but grisly one: post mortem data collection. Dental records, DNA samples and finger-prints which would later be matched with ante-mortem data collected from the victims’ families, homes or dentists. DNA and finger-print proved most problematic because of the terrible state of many of the bodies. But much good work was done. I once met an amazing Doctor doing a fantastic job of gaining fingerprint samples by de-laminating the top several layers of skin from a victim’s finger and then shrinking it back to a normal size, so that it could slip onto the end of his be-gloved finger and look like his own, so that a useable print could be obtained. My very own Thai dentist was one of so many who volunteered to go and take dental samples from bodies.
I have never in my whole life seen so many people pulling together as a huge human team trying to help. My pen picture above merely scratches the surface of the many self-less acts of so many people during that most terrible of times. I pay tribute to all of them. And I pay respect to all those souls who perished on that sad day and extend my condolences to the loved ones they left behind.
26 December 2007
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