The Hua Laem Tsunami Relief Effort
Koh Lanta Island, Thailand
photos and story by Julia Cumes
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Talek Khlongdee (4), plays with a bucket of water next to what used to be his family's home in the village of Hua Laem on Koh Lanta Island, Thailand. While many of the residents of Hua Laem lost their homes to the Tsunami, the villagers were able to repair pipes that bring fresh water from a municipal tank supplied by a nearby mountain stream. Behind Talek, his father picks through the rubble of their home, looking for salvagable items.
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The road to Hua Laem, a small fishing village on the east side of Koh Lanta island in Southern Thailand, is a snake of red dust, pocked with potholes. Few tourists travel this way as most come to Koh Lanta to go diving in the Andaman Sea's exotic reefs or lounge on the exquisite beaches on the island's west side. Through a cloud of copper dust, motor scooters buzz past us, some with veiled drivers and families with as many as three children squeezed onto the seat. We pass water buffalo lazily chewing in the midday heat, each one accompanied by a white egret, sharing polite company. While no road signs mark the village, we know we're there when we see a cluster of bright blue and orange tents and the metal-clad dome of a mosque opposite them. A canopy provides some reprieve from the sun and five or six villagers sit under it, talking quietly around a communal table. We can hear the the whisper of the ocean close by and we know this is the place.
My husband, David Karam, and I were about to head to Southeast Asia on a long-planned trip when the Tsunami struck Southern Asia on December 26th, 2004. As the images of horror and devastation quilted the newspapers and played out on news broadcasts, we began to rethink our plans. David, who has a Design-build business on Cape Cod, MA, has skills we thought might be of some use and, as a photojournalist, I thought I might be able to bring some attention to a community otherwise ignored. We talked at length and finally decided we would head south and look for a community that was not receiving the kind of attention it needed. Bangkok's newspapers were full of stories about the Tsunami's effect on Thailand's tourist industry. Money was pouring into Phuket, Thailand's most popular resort island; volunteers were already reconstructing damaged hotels and beaches. Finally we read an article about fishermen in Southern Thailand whose longtail boats had been severely damaged or completely destroyed. These men and the communities that depended on them had lost their source of income and were receiving little aid because they were not as central to Thailand's economy as tourism. This is the thread we followed from Bangkok to Krabi where a Thai Baptist Minister happened to mention Koh Lanta island and we began our journey on the dusty red road down to Hua Laem.
The first day we visited Hua Laem and assessed the damage, the power of the Tsunami was made tangible to us. Most of the village's homes had been built on stilts right on the beach and what was left of many of them was a collection of wood, concrete, clothing and household items strewn about. Septic pipes and children's toys, school books, shoes, fishing nets, plastic tubs, longtail boats beached like dead whales. Villagers seemed dazed, walking around in the rubble of their homes, picking up occasional items and then dropping them as though not sure what to do with them. I watched two little boys play with their home-made carved wooden boats in a ditch of water. Picking up a board of wood, one cried out "Tsunami Tsunami" and began creating great big waves that soon overwhelmed the toy boats. I knew from my psychologist parents that children often play out their traumas in their games and that this was most likely evidence of post traumatic stress disorder. An old man pointed to the trees above us. We could see the leaves below a certain height had turned brown from the salt water. This was how high the waves had come. Everywhere one looked--from the skeletal remains of boats and homes to the weary expressions on villagers' faces--one could see the destruction the Tsunami had wrought on Hua Laem.
The village of Hua Laem has been around for generations. The men traditionally fished, two or three to a boat, in their longtail wooden boats while the women raised the children and looked after their homes. Like the rest of Koh Lanta, the villagers are primarily Muslims with close families and a strong sense of community. The Mosque sits on the hill above the town and one can hear the sonorous prayer call rising up five times a day. Before the Tsunami hit on that Sunday morning, December 26th, someone in the town received a call from the other side of the island warning that a big wave was coming and everyone should get to higher ground. Parents gathered their children and miraculously almost everyone in the town made it up the hill just in time to watch the first wave crash into their village. While the first wave alarmed them, it was the second and third wave that did most of the damage. Villagers describe watching their longtail boats get pounded against their homes. One fishermen had run to the pier after the first wave to see whether he could save his boat. He did not anticipate the size of the second wave and his body has yet to be recovered. Villagers also describe seeing a woman--a "farang" as they call foreigners here--who was standing on the pier taking a photograph. Her body has not been found either. What's left of the pier is a series of twisted reinforced steel and broken concrete pilings and a section that miraculously survived the waves, eerily continuing out to sea as if it still serves a purpose.
After the waves died down, villagers stayed up on the hill above the town. The first few nights, they slept at a nearby school. The non-governmental organization, World Vision, set up blue and orange tents. Donations of food, water and clothing arrived from the Red Cross and various sources. "Everyone was terrified to go down the hill," says Susanna Bachman, an American woman from California who lives in Lanta Town which is joined to Hua Laem. Bachman and her Thai boyfriend were the first to return to their home to sleep after spending two days cleaning out the mud, sand and debris. Some villagers whose homes were not completely destroyed cautiously followed suit. Many stayed up on the hill, salvaged what items they could and made the best of the small space the tents provided. Some of the tents' occupants added makeshift canopies of wood and cloth to extend the living space and provide reprieve from the sun. Like all the villagers who lost their bathrooms to the Tsunami, Hyron Mon, 84, hobbles to the Mosque across the road on crutches to shower and use the bathroom. His 87 year-old wife, Yit, has carefully hung clothing racks to create some sense of privacy from their neighbors. A few rows back, Korntip Leamkoh, 22, lives with her husband, two young children, mother, brother, sister and brother-in-law in two tents joined together. Her father, Jeng, 40, was the man who lost his life trying to save his longtail boat. "We've had a small ceremony but we can't have a proper funeral yet because we don't have his body," says Leamkoh. "We're all getting sick from the dust and heat," she adds, wiping her daughter, Gitnmaree's nose. Despite the heat and challenges of tent-living, she and her two-year-old daughter continue to wear their traditional black veils, as if holding onto some semblance of their previous life.
A short while after the Tsunami hit, the government approached villagers who had lost their homes and offered to move them to another location away from the ocean. The idea was that they would build temporary houses for the interim and then move villagers to permanent housing within three months. Villagers would be safe if another Tsunami came, the government reminded them. Ten families signed on and the Thai military in conjunction with World Vision began erecting temporary housing on property behind the Buddhist Temple, a mile inland. Since then, villagers got wind of the government's plans to build a marina where Hua Laem's homes once stood. The temporary housing is almost complete--rows and rows of 12'x12' prefabricated single-room units--baking hot in the midday heat and lacking any kind of privacy. The villagers call the development "the hog farm". To make matters more complex, most of Hua Laem's aproximately 1,000 villagers are Muslim and the temporary housing is built on land belonging to the Buddhist Temple. The villagers decided to dig in their heels, determined to stay in the village they grew up in next to the ocean whose waters they are dependent on for a living. Referring to their long sea-faring heritage, the village drafted up a letter to the Minister of the Interior, explaining the reasons for their intentions to stay near the sea. With a renewed sense of purpose, villagers began to rebuild. They were encouraged to do so by a Thai social worker from Community Organization Development Institute (CODI), who suggested that the more effort they put into reestablishing themselves on the beach, the less likely the government would be to force them out. A village-wide clean-up began. Children picked through the debris, collecting items still usable as though it were treasure. An English volunteer named Scotty Lee showed up one morning after hearing about the effort in Hua Laem. In his youth he'd been a rugby player and grunting, he lead teams of men as they pulled up embedded support beams and dragged destroyed boats away from the houses to be burned. Bonfires rose up everywhere so that Hua Laem soon looked like a war-zone, made surreal and distorted by the heat waves.
Earlier in the week, David had negotiated prices for lumber, metal sheeting and tools from a local lumber yard and purchased enough materials to repair and rebuild 10 homes. Other Westerners, some of whom lived on the island, raised funds to help fishermen repair their fishing boats. Hua Laem was filled with the sounds of hammers and saws. After ten days of exhausting work, David, on a trip to the other side of the island to get more supplies, ran into a group of 14 disaster relief workers from Oklahoma. Veterans of the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 relief effort, the experienced Oklahoma Baptist Disaster Relief team was anxious to start work. They'd been traveling through Southern Thailand for a few days looking for somewhere to help but had been turned down everywhere as communities waited for government intervention. Two of the volunteers, Bob and Jeannie Spear, had lived in Thailand as Baptist Missionaries for 39 years and spoke the language fluently. After discussing the logistics, David celebrated his good fortune and took them to Hua Laem.
The day after they arrived, the fourteen Oklahoman volunteers, most of them between the ages of 65 and 80, were sweating in the hot Thai sun from 9am to 5pm with few breaks. One could not miss them in their yellow shirts and caps against the bright blue ocean, breaking up and hauling concrete on Hua Laem's low-tide flats. Bob and Jeannie Spears, who had brought their own reconstruction funds raised by their church community and friends, ordered more building materials to be delivered. Slowly the houses rose up, one after the next, their tin roofs gleaming in the late afternoon sun. Despite the many organizations and volunteers who came to support the efforts in Hua Laem, one afternoon an official from World Vision stopped by and warned David that he and the other Westerners should not be helping rebuild the village in its present location. Supporting the villager's wish to stay where they had lived for over 100 years, David responded politely and the men continued to work.
On the last day of our time in Hua Laem, something extraordinary happened. The day was exceptionally hot and few people were moving about. The villagers had opened sweet young coconuts for the volunteers at lunch, just one of the many edible offerings they'd made to show their appreciation. Having wrapped up their work framing the walls of the last house they were working on, the Oklahoma Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers bid farewell to the villagers. David said his goodbyes and finalized his list for the last order of lumber. Just then, a motorcade pulled into the village center with several news channel vehicles following closely behind. Within minutes, the villagers began to emerge from their shelters and form a circle in the town center. When a young Buddhist monk emerged from one of the vehicles, many of the Muslim villagers placed their hands together and bowed their heads in a show of respect. A Thai translator told us the new visitor was Buddha Isara, a highly esteemed Buddhist monk from Wat Aw Noi, a monastery just outside of Bangkok. Within Thailand, Isara is seen as a modern-day Gandhi figure, thus his presence in Hua Laem would give the villagers a powerful voice. After the meeting, Isara walked through the village, stopping to ask villagers questions as he assessed the damage to homes and boats. Unlike the other dignitaries who had visited Hua Laem in the weeks we'd been there, Isara stepped away from his entourage and climbed down from the upper road to the tidal flats. David and I exchanged glances, pleased as we watched Isara carefully make his way through the remaining debris. We knew this perspective would allow him to see the full scope of the damage. Our greatest concern was whether there would be an ongoing volunteer effort after our departure. Watching the revered monk move gracefully through the rubble, we both knew the villagers were in good hands.
Hua Laem, which has made this exquisite piece of coast its home for so many years, will remain where it is. While the villagers still face an uphill battle after all the volunteers leave, those gleaming roofs, we hope, will send a message of determination. Images of the Tsunami may haunt its inhabitant for years, but perhaps with time, what they remember will not be the waves that destroyed but the good will that followed. As we head into our final days in Thailand, I think about how I've come to love the road that leads to Hua Laem. I think of all the other roads we'd planned to take on our trip and how this one, which every day has turned our clothes and skin copper red with a fine layer of dust, will be indelibly etched in our memories.
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