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The day we shall not forget

Published on December 26, 2005 - Many faces of disaster. As Thailand remembers the worst disaster to hit the country – along with several other Indian Ocean nations – in modern times, many people are still working and sacrificing themselves to repair the damage wrought by nature’s wrath. The Nation looks at the works of some of them.

'Loy Kratong' memorial candle

While most aid organisations poured their resources into affected areas in the South, Phan Wannamethee, secretary-general of the Thai Red Cross Society, has been travelling between Bangkok and northeastern provinces. There are many tsunami orphans waiting for help outside the directly affected areas, said Phan. These children lost their parents in the killer waves last December. They are among thousands of workers from the region who comprised a key source of labour in the tourist districts on the Andaman Sea.

About 350 orphans were left behind with their grandparents in 20 northeastern provinces.

Learning of the plight of these children made Phan realise that the impact of the tsunami extends far beyond the South. Subsequently the Thai Red Cross Society has sought to address the need for helping hands to extend beyond directly affected areas.

“Few people know about the plight of these children,” Phan said. “I hope people follow our lead and extend help to them. Right now, we are committed to providing them with scholarships until they finish college.”

In addition to helping these children over the past year, the Thai Red Cross Society has so far spent Bt300 million to help rebuild lives in the six coastal provinces, he explained. Red Cross relief works have included the construction of three new villages in Phang Nga, and the building and distribution of 500 fibreglass fishing boats.

More than 150 families have already moved into the new villages and many more seek to live under the society’s care.

“We are currently on the second step which is to help people resume their normal lives,” he said.

However, some fishermen have complained about the new boats.

“They were familiar with wooden boats and think the fibreglass ones are not safe. But it was HRH Princess Sirindhorn’s idea to save forests by replacing wood with fibreglass. The Princess herself participated in a test by sitting in a fibreglass boat to ensure its safety,” Phan said.

Though the society’s relief efforts have been successful in helping to rebuild lives after the tsunami, the secretary-general said that society had also learned some lessons from its efforts.

For example, he added, officials and villagers should be trained in first aid and sea rescue operations in case there is another large-scale disaster like the tsunami.

“Disaster preparedness is the most important project that needs to be done with the participation of people in affected communities,” said Phan.

Subhead here….

Thailand’s leading businesspeople have so far contributed nearly Bt200 million to aid fishermen affected by last December’s tsunami.

In return for their generosity they have learned a valuable lesson on how to make contributions that are socially sustainable and useful.

The devastating natural disaster inspired the corporate sector to be more inventive and strategic with their donations. The focus of these efforts over the past year has been on helping fishermen in tsunami-affected areas to return to their livelihoods.

“We heard from the media that most assistance focused on tourist businesses, houses and schools damaged by the wave. I wondered if there were other affected people in need of help,” said Suranuch Thongsila, manager of the Siam Cement Foundation.

“We visited affected sites and talked to the villagers. We found that most affected people are fishermen and all they wanted is to have their missing or damaged boats replaced so that they could go back to sea.”

Suranuch and her colleagues from Siam Cement were among the very first people to visit the six tsunami-affected provinces last December. They found, for example, that in Baan Nam Khem, which was the most affected community in Phang Nga, only 40 out of 300 boats survived the disaster. More than 20,000 boats were reported missing or damaged.

As a result, the original intention to make donations through charities and humanitarian organisations changed. Suranuch pulled together some 20 corporations and set up a revolving fund to build 29 boatyards to serve 69 fishing communities in the six provinces.

“We don’t give away money to individuals, but contribute in the form of revolving funds to be collectively managed by communities. People can take out loans from the fund and return it when they can on conditions they set up. The aid is given with respect while recipients accept the help with dignity.”

Corporations that have contributed to the fund include Toyota Motors (Thailand), Michelin Siam and Siam Commercial Bank.

Their limited experience in working directly with communities has been bridged by a network of social activists under the umbrella of the Save Andaman Sea Network.

Suranuch herself closely supervised the aid operation by travelling extensively in the field. She found that relief work could have been improved by good management if donors wanted to see their money go to the right hands.

“Many donors just dumped their help for the sake of giving without studying people’s real needs,” she said. “Some forms of help were duplicated and some villagers ended up receiving what they didn’t need while others didn’t get enough.”

Suranuch learned from working in the villages that restoring the livelihoods of affected people can’t be done in just one year. She has already planned a second phase of assistance that will be focused on building community schools for boat building to create a new line of work for the younger generation.

“We learnt a valuable lesson regarding the meaning of giving, that it is more about sharing than charity,” Suranuch said.

Subhead: Cutting his teeth on disaster

Bill Paterson had a torrid introduction to the Land of Smiles. The Australian ambassador had been due to arrive in Bangkok on January 5, but the day after Christmas he was forced to fly up to help manage the tsunami response.

Paterson’s long experience as a diplomat was vital during the crisis. He spoke recently about arriving amid “hundreds of injured” at Phuket and the key role Australia played after the tragedy.

Flying over Khao Lak and Baan Nam Khem in a helicopter and seeing the devastation, with fishing vessels strewn across the landscape shocked him, but his consular staff were already busy on the ground.

“Touring Wat Yan Yao [in Takua Pa district, where hundreds of bodies were stored] had a big impact. But it wasn’t as big as the impact of dealing with relatives – dealing with the living is the hard part.”

Despite no previous posting in Thailand, Paterson was chosen by his foreign counterparts to act as the contact with the Interior Ministry to coordinate storage of bodies for later identification. A series of meetings with officials from other countries whose nationals were lost led to the setting-up of a disaster identification task force.

“We got a request from the Royal Thai Police to provide DVI [disaster victims’ identification] resources and we just did it. The Interior Minister [Bhokin Bhalakula] made things happen. He was very accessible – I saw him up to four times a day.

“We’ve learnt quite a lot about disaster management in the past few years in Australia. We’ve had our fair share of dramas,” he said, noting the four major bombings in Bali and Jakarta.

“Our initial focus was on locating the missing, identifying the dead and assisting the injured, and setting up a consular database,” he said.

“But as the scale of the disaster became evident, we realised we needed to ramp up and a disaster identification team was from the Australian Federal Police was put together and came up [to Phuket].

“We ended up with a staff of 80 in Phuket. Luckily the number of victims ended up quite small, compared to other areas.” Just 23 Australians died and all their bodies ended up being found.

Australia hired Kenyon International, a firm that deals with mass tragedies, whose services it used for mortuary assistance and repatriation after the first Bali bombs.

“Relatives were arriving in droves,” he said. And there was and enormous demand for news.

“Australia ended up playing a key role, I think, because we were the biggest and earliest team on the ground. We’ve had a 30-year relationship with the Royal Thai police, and they asked us to take a joint leadership role. Quite quickly, 33 other countries joined this operation. They all worked to an international standard and very harmoniously.

“We asked Kenyon to provide services to everyone. It cost US$15 million (Bt600 million), but it was money well spent.”

But the key that made it work, he said, was Thai cooperation, volunteerism and generosity.

Subhead here…

On the morning of December 26, 2004 Jonas Hafstrom, Sweden’s ambassador to Thailand, sat with his wife and children on a jet at Bangkok Airport looking forward to a short vacation on the beach in Khao Lak. Little did he know at that exact moment in Khao Lak more than 5,000 people, including a few hundred of his countrymen, were dying in a series of massive tsunami waves.

His flight never left the ground after the pilots received word that the runway at Phuket airport was flooded. Instead of a week of fun in the sun, he would later discover first hand the horrors nature can dish up in the blink of an eye.

After he learned that a tsunami had struck, and knowing that many of his countrymen were vacationing on the Andaman Sea coast, he took the first available flight down to Phuket that evening.

The first foreign diplomat in Thailand to reach the scene of the devastation, Hafstrom didn’t realise the magnitude of the disaster until the following day, when the light of day revealed the carnage. After the dour toll was taken in the ensuing months, it would come out that Sweden suffered the most deaths in the tsunami of all countries after Thailand. To date 525 of the 543 Swedes listed as missing in the disaster have been identified and confirmed dead.

When he first arrived, though, mayhem did not greet him.

“We went to Bangkok Phuket Hospital that night and it was eerily calm,” he recalled.

“Later on Monday morning, it was as if the gates had opened and people streamed in from all over the region.”

That day he took an arduous car ride to Khao Lak despite the rumours he’d heard about downed bridges and that it was unreachable. After he saw the levelled beachfront town and all of the scores of dead he rang Stockholm, a call the Swedish press dubbed the turning point in its country’s response.

Hafstrom and embassy staff went to work to set up a temporary consulate and reception in Phuket. By week’s end, there were between 80 and 100 Swedes from the country’s Foreign Ministry, the police (which sent forensics teams), non-governmental organisations like Save the Children and the Swedish Red Cross, Sweden’s military, the Swedish church and volunteers from its expatriate community in Thailand.

They worked to counsel survivors and ferry survivors out of the region and back to Bangkok and hospitals there.

Yet he was most impressed with the local response.

“There was water, food, clothes, and shelter, all the basic level needs,” he said. “Had all of that not been available, it would have been much worse.

“The Thais helped the guests in their country first. They used all of their resources on the foreigners and Thais were helped second. If this had happened in another country, I don’t think this would have been the case.”

He said the tsunami has further cemented the ties that bind Sweden and Thailand. To show its appreciation, the Swedish government has contributed Bt5 million to help cleanse the seawater-tainted water supplies in Khao Lak and another Bt5 million to rehabilitate coral reefs damaged by the tsunami. And last week it pitched in US$2.5 million (Bt103 million) into an Indian Ocean regional tsunami early-warning system fund run by the UNESCAP.

And the Swedish foreign service is determined to be more prepared the next time disaster strikes. To that end it has put together disaster response plans which the Swedish embassy recently practised with its staff and expatriates with special skills and local knowledge.

Reported by Subhatra Bhumiprabhas, Nils Wright, Jim Pollard