I happened by chance to visit Thailand the day after the 2004 Tsunami struck. When I returned, my hospital asked me to write about my experience.
January 2005
I was lucky enough to spend December 28th through January 4th in Thailand, and have been asked to write a bit about the experience. Some may find the word “lucky” a strange choice given the disaster that struck there on the 26th, but I think it applies.
For one thing, I was lucky that I didn’t arrive 48 hours sooner: my hotel reservation was on Ko Phi Phi island, which was slammed from both sides by the tsunami. Beyond that, though, I was lucky to have the experience of working with volunteers from around the globe, all eager to offer whatever skills they had to alleviate the suffering that the Thai and so many foreign tourists endured that week.
The trip had been a last-minute decision: I heard that my friend Jena was going to be in Thailand for a few weeks, and with a lot of goodwill from the other doctors in my group, I was able to switch enough shifts to make it worth the 20-hour flight. Some kayaking, some Scuba-diving, some stargazing under smog-free skies– what better way to bring in the new year?
But when I awoke December 26th, bags all packed, CNN was broadcasting “Breaking News” that was likely to alter my plans. I’d like to say my first reaction was concern whether anyone was hurt, but to be honest, as I finished off my granola my thoughts were more along the lines of, “A tidal wave?? You have GOT to be kidding me. If my dive trip is cancelled, they better refund my money.”
As if on cue, the phone rang. It was Jena, calling from Bangkok to see if I was still coming. In retrospect, her first thoughts weren’t much better than mine: “Do you think we can still go to Ko Phi Phi? I bet it won’t be as crowded.” Though we both may seem outrageously callous, the truth is we just had no idea how serious things were. Jena hadn’t even had access to a television yet.
As we spoke, I surfed the web for news—and watched slack-jawed as the death toll climbed and the first photos of the destroyed beachfronts of Phuket came through. It dawned on me that, had the wave struck 48 hours later, we might have been killed. From halfway around the world, I let her know what was going on a few hours south of her. Stunned, she managed to change gears, and her thoughts turned to how we might help. We decided the best she could do for now was find us a new place to stay in southern Thailand; it being New Year’s week, virtually everything was booked.
We’d figure out the rest when I got there.
December 28th
I landed in Bangkok about 50 hours after the waves hit, met Jena, and we sat down to hash out a plan over a couple of beers. We had a flight booked to Ko Samui, an island on the eastern (Gulf of Thailand) side unaffected by the tsunami. We debated flying to Phuket instead; the problem was, we had no idea what we would find when we got there. The pictures on CNN were not encouraging, and on top of that there were no rooms available anywhere. Camping on the beach was unappealing for many reasons: we thought it likely that no drinking water would be available, we were concerned about what might wash ashore, and worst of all, we wondered if aftershocks would bring another wave.
Having no idea how to help, we tried phoning the hospitals listed in our “Let’s Go Thailand” book. But neither of us spoke Thai, phone communication was exasperating, and ultimately we were unable to get any reassurance that we would not be utterly stranded once we arrived in Phuket. My sense was that, once we heroically arrived, we’d immediately become part of the problem. I voted we take our flight to Ko Samui. Flights were still available between Ko Samui and Phuket; in a day or two, I thought we’d have enough information to make that trip.
The plan didn’t sit well with Jena. She reluctantly agreed, but she sure wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t want to go to Ko Samui– she wanted to help. In fact, she had an almost visceral need to help that to me seemed to be impeding rational thought. I figured that, being a teacher, she had never seen a dead body, nor participated in any sort of disaster planning. She understood it was possible that total chaos was reigning in Phuket– but I didn’t think she was taking into account what that meant for our safety or emotional well-being. I told myself we were doing the smart thing by heading to Ko Samui; she told me I was mentally disturbed if I went diving at a time like this.
Our conflict seems kind of amusing now (to me, anyway), but it actually raised some interesting issues about what emotional responses to the disaster were appropriate. Jena was truly, deeply saddened, and it showed. She asked: “If you don’t at least TRY to help first, how can you possibly enjoy yourself?” But to me, there was something not just acceptable but actually appropriate about hiking and diving along the coast of Ko Samui. We still had no idea how (or even if) we could help, and I didn’t think rushing headlong into a disaster area was necessarily noble. Until we could formulate a plan, sitting around saying “I feel so sad” made no sense to me. The fact was, I didn’t feel sad– I was, if anything, sort of exhilarated. We were, in fact, lucky to be alive– and I felt it. I wanted very much to spend a day as the New Year arrived, right there near “ground zero,” making sure I showed Mother Nature a little appreciation. I knew no better way to express my gratitude than surrounded by– literally, immersed in– the beauty that that corner of the Earth had to offer.
There was no easy way to reconcile our differing emotions. Luckily, the woman who rented us a motorbike in Ko Samui provided a solution. She had a friend on Phuket who could connect us with the relief effort. By the time I was back from diving, the woman had reached her friend and we had a plan: there was a Crisis Center in Phuket, a place for volunteers and survivors to go, and she would make certain that if we were stuck, we had a bed at night. It was settled: we would catch the 8am flight the next morning.
JANUARY 1st
Amazingly, the flight was packed. We had to go standby; to this day I have no idea why all those people were headed to Phuket. It was New Year’s Day, and the Australian guy waiting across from me was still so drunk he was drooling on his beloved rugby shirt. The staff of Bangkok Air asked why we were going to Phuket, and my medical background got us bumped up a spot or two in line; apparently there was less of a need for drooling rugby players. (To be fair, we met entire teams of Australian forensics squads once we landed; in fact I met many more Australian volunteers than Americans. The drooler was an outlier.)
The “I’m a doctor” line had to be repeated often enough that we ended up in conversation with the man ahead of us. He was in his 50’s, and looked like he hadn’t had much of a vacation on Ko Samui. His name was Don Shruhan. His first words to us were, “It’s pretty bad over there.”
If ever there was a book not to be judged by its cover, Don was it. Stocky, a little overweight, and with a noticeable Boston accent, he looked exactly like the sort of American tourist I was determined to avoid. I guessed he was using the drama of the tsunami to feel self-important– HE knew what we were in for, just ask him.
Boy was I wrong.
Don turned out to be a retired Federal Agent. Raised in Boston by working-class parents, he’d spent most of his life since college living in various parts of Asia. After his early retirement, Pfizer hired him to infiltrate and break up counterfeit medication factories throughout Asia. (Far from self-important, Don saw the humor in “making Viagra safe for all mankind.”) He lived in Hong Kong with his family, where his kids were getting a worldview he could never have hoped for in Boston. Life had dealt him some fat-and-happy cards, and he was making the most of them… until Pfizer asked him to please find a family of Norwegian employees that had been vacationing in Thailand when the tsunami hit.
Don had just spent three days searching the hospitals and temples-cum-morgues north of Phuket. He’d found their passports, but the family of five was gone… or more likely, unidentifiable without DNA analysis.
This was the first we had heard about the DNA sampling taking place, and Don knew more about it than he cared to. He had gone to the temples with an unpleasant enough task: to identify family members from photos he’d been given. But he’d been completely unprepared for the condition the bodies were in. “I couldn’t even tell Scandinavians from Asians,” he said. “The bloating… they are so disfigured, every one of them, they may as well be the same person. And you just can’t bear to look at the kids.” He was clearly shaken.
Don had just returned to Ko Samui, where his family was staying, the night before– when Pfizer called and asked him to go back to look for another family. Or more specifically, for one person: a six year old boy named Justeine Lundring. Justeine’s two siblings and parents were known to be dead– but someone had reported seeing him at one of the hospitals near Phuket, and Pfizer was asking Don to chase down the lead, for the sake of his remaining relatives. It was pretty clear that Don was highly doubtful he’d find Justeine alive, but he was holding out hope he wouldn’t have to return to the temples.
You didn’t have to listen to his descriptions to know how bad things were– you just had to hear the tone of his voice. Don was emotionally drained– his affect was somewhat flattened, in psych terminology– and for the first time, Jena said quietly, “Maybe they have something for me to do that doesn’t deal with the bodies.”
I began to hope the same thing for myself.
Luckily for us, Don took us under his wing. He was the right friend to make, because all the financial power of Pfizer was behind him. There was a Mercedes waiting at the airport, and he insisted if we came with him he’d be able to secure a room at his hotel. It was 30 minutes north of Phuket, and we never would have wound up there on our own, partly because it costs a fortune to stay there. But as it turned out, the worst damage was 120km north of Phuket, so the hotel was relatively “convenient” in that regard. For that reason, many of the forensics teams and rescue squads were staying there, and they were offering a “rescuer rate” that Don made sure we got.
As soon as we dumped our bags, Don drove us to the Crisis Center, where he left us so that he could meet with the Thai equivalent of the CIA, to enable him to get hospital records and the like on Justeine Lundring.
The Crisis Center was set up on the lawn acreage in front of Phuket’s Town Hall. There was plenty of space– and it was all being used. Long open-sided tents were set up, with areas marked off for “Sweden”, “Japan”, “Counseling Area”, and of course, “Missing.” This last was where you went to give information about your loved ones and tried to sort through the data that had been collected for any clues. Lining the parking areas were dozens of food vendors, all offering free meals, all day long. In the back, a building had been taken over for organizing volunteers. Free internet access was available on dozens of computers; another room was filled with laptops trying to coordinate photo databases of the missing and dead. Local phone companies had set up free phone lines to dial anywhere worldwide. People with no computer or health-related skills were offering their time as drivers, shuttling volunteers and survivors to the airport, or north to the devastated areas around Khao Lak.
Within ten minutes we had met volunteers from at least five countries, who had been there for a few days and had meshed into a true “coalition of the willing.” Ilya from Russia was one of the coordinators, Jason from England was looking to bring in more counselors, Wil from Canada was trying to hook us up with other doctors, Sonya from Thailand (but raised in the US, judging by her accent) was coordinating van rides to Khao Lak, Erik from Sweden was trying to get a medical team out to Ko Phi Phi. These are just a few, off the top of my head. There were literally hundreds of people there, working for free, 8am to 10pm or later. Piles of donated clothing were brought in every day and sorted for shipment to the homeless. Speakers were distributed throughout to keep people updated (in amusingly calm voices at times) on the best place to get information, a ride, a shower. The place was a hive of activity.
But more than that, it was abuzz with… for lack of a better word, good karma. (If there is an appropriate place to use that word, Thailand is it. The monks would appreciate it.) People were tired, emotionally beaten down in many cases, and surrounded by tremendous loss. But every single volunteer I saw had an edge of excitement to them; no one was there who didn’t want to be– and it seemed like EVERYONE was there. There was no clear central authority at the Crisis Center; I saw no police, no military, no badges of any kind. Nonetheless, volunteers were streaming in and being put to use. It was a somewhat imperfect storm of good intentions and good-enough skills. The job was getting done.
So we soon wondered where they would send us. Jena had plenty of computer skills and felt, understandably, no great urge to deal with the dead. Their initial excitement at the arrival of a doctor soon gave way to reality: it wasn’t clear how they could use me. Most wounded foreigners (i.e., English-speakers) had already been evacuated to Bangkok or their home countries. The remaining “medical” (as opposed to forensic) need seemed to be for mental health workers– for survivors and, increasingly, for the volunteers that had already been retrieving bodies for two days.
A flurry of discussion arose over whether they could send me to Phi Phi island, which the military had closed to visitors. There was now no health care there at all, and apparently about 300 residents of the island were still there. A Swede by the name of Erik Liungman had been on the island when the wave hit and had organized the evacuation of 135 or so severely injured people by military helicopters. Now he wanted to use his newfound “pull” with the Thai government to send me over there to run a medical relief outpost and organize getting clean water available before disease broke out. A woman named Supinga (who turned out to be related to the King and was therefore a force to be reckoned with) asked that I write up a list of medications and supplies that were the bare minimum I would need to get started. I took about 30 minutes to think that one through (an exercise I recommend for any ER doctor… sort of a fun challenge) and handed her a list. After a couple hours of phone calls, though, it became clear that this was not a plan that would be implemented that day. The military had closed the island, and it would take a military escort to get there. The Swedish Red Cross had 30 million dollars to spend but Erik was about to tear his hair out trying to get access to any of it (“They should call it the Red Tape, not the Red Cross!”).
Jena had had enough of good intentions. I was afraid that if she didn’t do SOMETHING to help before sundown, she might just have a stroke. We decided that rather than waste any more time, we’d head up to Khao Lak. If we wanted to help at all, it seemed the bodies were all that was left.
JANUARY 2nd: Wat Yanyao
Temples in Thailand are often a repository for the dead before burial, and it is not uncommon for cremations to take place at the larger ones. Nikornwararam temple, or Wat Yanyao, is the largest of the three in the Takua Pa district near Khao Lak. Built in 1950, it is well shaded and set back from the road, and one can imagine it being a quiet place conducive to the monks’ morning and evening prayers. But not this week. Since the tsunami, it has become the largest morgue in Thailand.
The first bodies arrived the evening of December 26th. Within five days the number of dead at the temple had jumped to 1500, and they were still bringing them in by the truckload.
The Wat was anything but peaceful: Vans pulled up outside the main temple gates and dropped off volunteers. Trucks loaded down with the dead pulled in past stacks of coffins 20 feet high that were nearly all useless: built for normal-sized people, they couldn’t accomodate the bloated bodies being recovered. (At least the coffins weren’t a complete waste: the IT people were using them as computer desks.) The right side of the entry-road was lined with giant refrigerator units where the bodies that had been “processed” (DNA-sampled or otherwise identified) were being stored. The unprocessed bodies were in the back somewhere, thankfully out of sight of the main temple areas. Unfortunately, sight was not the only sense at work there. The outdoor breezes were all that kept the smell from being overpowering; as it was, everyone wore masks, and Jena gladly proffered some scented oil to put in ours.
The main temple had been taken over for the IT folks who set up about two dozen laptops and diligently converted photos of the dead to an online database. There was a morbidly comical dressing-waltz carried out around the central temple: the prayer area was open on two sides to the outdoors, with only a banister encircling it. To one side of the banister, people preparing to cleanse the bodies donned gowns, gloves, boots and masks– while the IT folks stepping past the same banister into the temple area were removing their shoes to respect the prayer space (overtaken by laptops). An ever-shifting pile of shoes marked the tempo of activities.
A loudspeaker system allowed the powers that be to keep us apprised of how we could be most useful. And before long we learned just who was in charge, as I turned in shock to see Tina Turner come up and take the mic!
It turned out it wasn’t Tina Turner, but they definitely shared a hair stylist at one point. It was Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunan, Thailand’s chief forensic pathologist and, by all accounts, “the queen” of the temple and greatly respected. She was in charge of coordinating the DNA collection from the 5000 or so bodies, and I doubt she slept much that week.
Word came around that the recovery work had unearthed a fishing village that had been largely wiped out, and some trucks were on the way with bodies. Jena initially headed over to see if there was computer work to be done. In an unfortunate twist, she took a break a while later to look for the bathroom and was directed “behind those buildings,” which ultimately resulted in her stumbling directly into a field with row upon row of corpses. So much for avoiding the bodies.
I don’t have the skill to properly describe the fields behind the temples, except to say that it is every bit as disturbing as you might imagine. It looks like photos from Rwanda or Kosovo, or maybe Vietnam. The forensics teams deserve some sort of Medal of Honor for the work they did… and are still doing. I was able to help for a short time with a couple of the teams, collecting bone marrow specimens from the tibias of the victims for DNA analysis. Being anywhere near the bodies for any length of time requires a certain “separation” from the reality you are dealing with. For the most part the extreme disfigurement allowed one to pretend they weren’t all once individual people, but every so often a personal item, a ring or a necklace, unkindly brought reality to the fore. The teams were accustomed to being deployed to plane crashes and the like– 250 victims at worst. By the time I arrived, they had been at it for at least three days, and the seemingly endless parade of horror was starting to get to them.
Beyond DNA analysis, the work of the volunteers involved cleaning the bodies (with hoses), disinfecting them (with what must have been formaldehyde, as the smell brought me abruptly back to anatomy lab), and then spreading dry ice to preserve them to whatever degree possible.
There are two images that I doubt I’ll lose from this trip. The first is a field of swollen bodies, with gowned and masked volunteers hovering over them, and smoke from the dry ice drifting off of them in the breeze.
JANUARY 3rd: Khao Lak
The next morning, Don asked if we wanted to help him. He had to locate a particular resort, the Bann Khao Lak, where Justeine’s family had stayed, in an effort to find clues as to where Justeine might have wound up. Don knew he might have to visit the temples, and it was abundantly clear he was dreading it. We figured the least we could do was keep him company; if we got lucky, we might even find Justeine. Even the slim hope of finding a live person seemed far more appealing than another day with the bodies. (Again– the forensics teams deserve medals.)
After a very light breakfast, we hopped gratefully into the Mercedes.
It is true that parts of Phuket (Patong and Kamala beach, among others) got slammed pretty hard. Nonetheless, cleanup efforts commenced immediately; given that the Crisis Center was set up at Phuket’s Town Hall, and that they have easy access to military and medical aid, they should recover quickly. In fact if you pick your beach carefully, you could already go back.
The town of Khao Lak, about 120km north of Phuket, is a different story.
Khao Lak was… well, if not obliterated, it was rendered “unvisitable” for the foreseeable future. It’s not nearly as bad as Banda Aceh in Indonesia, but… it’s very bad. On our visits up to the temples we had been routed around the town itself, so our drive with Don was our first look. It was “T + Day 7”, the roads had been cleared and some cleanup work had begun.
We drove for about three miles through devastation. I have truly never seen anything like it; it’s difficult to imagine the force of the waves hitting the shoreline. On the side of the road away from the beach, structures over 300 yards away from the water still had their ground-floors smashed through, though the frames and second floor at that distance were intact. As for the side of the road nearer to the beach… it wasn’t so much that buildings were destroyed; we had all seen photos of hurricane or tornado damage. It was the fact that as we drove, the destruction just kept going. For miles! Cars on the second floor of buildings. Trucks bent in two. Massive construction equipment laying upside down. Buildings with half their structure torn away. (Surprisingly, many of the palm trees were left standing.)
We were looking for one hotel in particular, the Baan Khao Lak resort.
I wish I could show you a picture of the area now, but… sadly, my camera was stolen. Regardless, without a wide-angle lens you can’t appreciate the scale of the destruction. Except in the case of Baan Khao Lak– because, after asking three different people and double-checking the translations, it became clear that … all that was left is sand. There was nothing. We couldn’t even find the pool.
I later found this picture of Baan Khao Lak the week we were there, and the rebuilt resort five years later: https://library.panos.co.uk/features/stories/tsunami-revisited.html#0_00106889
We searched through the rubble of adjacent, more substantial structures.
The Orchid Beach Resort next door (identified by an umbrella I found on the second floor) had no first floor to speak of but the second floor rooms were structurally intact. There among sodden, overturned beds and dressers we found four passports from a German family that could be returned to their embassy… and various paraphernalia of lives from across Europe: Scuba lesson plans for a French woman, traveler’s checks belonging to a Dutch man, a CD with “Tropical Music” written neatly on it (I took that one, for some reason struck by the urge to hear what the woman had been listening to, but it was too badly damaged to play). Sandals, backpacks, photos, a bracelet of seashells.
Those small items brought home the reality that these 140,000 people were each separate beings at one time… before they were melded into one very large number that we can’t mentally process. I started to feel the weight of the tragedy that Jena had been trying to deal with from day one. Nonetheless… while I felt it “intellectually,” it didn’t sit in my gut the way it seemed to for her.
I have never been one for AIDS ribbons or breast cancer pins or any other “group grief” sort of gesture. To me those things are ways of saying you’ve done something without actually doing a whole lot of anything. Somehow this was a similar issue to me. I hadn’t personally lost anyone I knew. And I knew full well from my work in the Emergency Department that thousands of people die in horrible ways each day and go utterly unnoticed by the world. Where was the grief for those people, who lost their lives in car accidents and apartment fires and swimming pools without having their fate plastered across our TV screens for weeks on end? Were they less deserving of our tears? The tsunami victims were all strangers to me; should I grieve for these strangers but no others?
The two bottles of water we’d brought were long empty and all three of us were feeling parched. We accepted that looking through the scattered belongings was pointless. There was no chance of any of this would lead us to Justeine.
We hadn’t seen a single open store (or even a standing storefront for that matter), but I eventually spotted four people maybe a hundred yards off the beach, sitting around a card table outside an awning that had some sort of Coca-Cola sign on it. We pulled over, and I picked my way through the mud up the hill to them– to find a the tiny shop had only with what few remaining possessions they had salvaged. I was embarrassed to ask if they knew where we could get some water. Yet they smiled broadly at me, and were even eager to make conversation.
The Thai are called the “Mai pen rai” people, which loosely translated means, “everything will be okay.” It’s a reflection of Buddhist influence within Thai culture, a sense that people don’t have much control, and karma will sort things out. Needless to say, this attitude was sorely tested that week, and they were not found wanting. The four men around the card table people had to have known dozens of the dead. But their demeanor was one of acceptance, resilience and trust that everything will be okay.
I should also mention that at no time during our trip did anyone beg us for money. One could say that this attitude came straight from the top: the Prime Minister spoke on national TV during our time there, saying: “We don’t need your money. We do need the expertise of the forensic teams that have come, and for that we are grateful– but financially, the people of Thailand will take care of ourselves.” This attitude, a sort of dignified national pride, was pervasive throughout our visit.
Still thirsty (but somewhat cheered up by the encounter), we made our way back to the car. Jena’s cold shoulder was thawing a bit; perhaps she saw empathy in my awkward efforts to chat with the Thai. But I was still closed off emotionally. I reasoned that, yes, 140,000 people were dead– but over 220,000 babies are born each day. As we picked my way across the beach on Day T+7, the world population stood at 1.4 million more humans than before the tsunami hit. In that sense, the loss of life was negligible. If I was going to grieve, it wasn’t going to be just because everyone else was doing so. I needed to feel it.
They say you get what you ask for…
That evening Don received a phone call.
A woman had seen one of the posters he put up of Justeine, and said she thought she recognized his photo at the Wat Yanyao. Don had to go back there to check it out. Having to go up there alone, at night, just didn’t seem right. Jena and I looked at each other and silently agreed; we both asked to come along. So, we headed off one last time for the Wat.
On the one hand, we all knew that the odds of recognizing anyone from those photos was slim to none. But on the other hand… the photos we had of Justeine showed a characteristic gap-toothed grin. Jena said, “Maybe if the teeth are showing in the photo…” In less than twelve hours we’d transformed from eager junior detectives to grizzled vets just hoping to identify a body.
We tried to lighten the mood with favorite stories from our various travels. Don took the cake with a tale from India of a guided tour to the Taj that had gone awry when the driver had gotten out of the car to pay a toll and been struck by another car, which unfortunately “knocked the English out of him,” leaving them in the middle of nowhere with no translator. It was hilarious at the time… though now that story seems pretty morbid. I guess it’s all relative.
When we reached the temple we moved quickly to the photo board. Although I’d seen quite a few of the dead in the field behind the Wat, we were now forced to look closely at their faces. Paradoxically, it was such a horror show that it actually almost became easy to tune it out: if I squinted my eyes just a bit, they could have been mannequins from a zombie movie. I worked my way past hundreds of faces, making sure to look very closely and occasionally referring back to the picture of Justeine. I was in the zone, getting the job done.
Until I came to the last board, which held the second image from the trip that I will never forget.
There among the dead, was a color photo that a German man had placed of his girlfriend, full of life and undeniably a human being. She was one of the missing. She wasn’t muddy or grey or bloated. She was smiling, standing on a deck outside what I suppose was her home, looking over at someone or something I couldn’t see. She looked very happy, radiant even, and shockingly out of place on that board.
Underneath her picture, the man wrote phone numbers where he could be reached in Thailand and in Germany. He added the following words:
I LOVE THIS WOMAN– Help me, PLEASE!!
Of all the images I have from Thailand, that man’s handwriting is the most vivid. I can’t even remember what the woman looked like, but his words are clear as day. You couldn’t read them and not break down.
It took me a while, but I finally got it.
The tragedy wasn’t the deaths; the world can spin on with far fewer humans than are currently crammed aboard.
The tragedy is the pain of the survivors. It’s 140,000 of the living, shouting,
I love this woman, this man, this child—PLEASE HELP ME!!!
…But when entire towns wash away, who is there to comfort you in your loss? Who will a man talk to about the woman he loved, when all of his friends have been swept away??
I could have looked at dead bodies all day by then. But I imagined 140,000 notes like that, and I thought I might suffocate from the weight of them.
We never found Justeine.
–JT