tsunami devastates south asia

It was a wave--it was a monster. It rose from the deep and swallowed life whole in coastal towns across nearly a dozen countries. The seams of the Earth moved on December 26, sending up a wall of water that rolled across the Indian Ocean, throwing boats into hotel lobbies, bodies into trees, turning a world upside down. From luxury resorts in Thailand to fishing villages in Sri Lanka, the death toll rises every day, well above the already unimaginable 120,000 mark. In the end, the full impact of one of the worst natural disasters in history may never be known. A generation of lost children. An estimated 5 million people displaced. And in the detritus of shattered lives, homes, and futures, survivors facing the daunting task of rebuilding it all.

On the west coast of Indonesia's remote Aceh province, which faced the earthquake's epicenter, entire communities were swept away. In the town of Meulaboh, the stench of rotting humanity is overwhelming, and survivors stumbled through the streets with scarves covering their noses and mouths. A 45-foot-long fishing boat stands like a run-aground ark in front of an unfinished shopping center, and young boys wandered the streets, scavenging for food between corpses covered in plastic sheets. One fifth of the town's 50,000 residents are estimated to have died, and another 30,000 more are homeless--but at some point, people just stopped counting. Nurjamin Samsinar, 42, who lives less than a mile from the beach, has been haphazardly burying the bodies that litter the streets. "We thought it wasn't possible that the ocean could flood the town," he says. "But when the second wave came, it was huge, twice the size of the mosque . . . . I thought it was the end of the world."
The most massive relief effort in history is just beginning in this post-apocalyptic environment and will still mean the difference between life and death for many survivors. The United Nations says up to 5 million people now lack access to the bare necessities of life: clean water, food, shelter, sanitation, and healthcare. The fear of disease spreading from rotting corpses and contaminated water makes the speed of delivery that much more crucial .While over half a billion dollars of aid is pouring into the region, much of it has been slow to reach the affected areas, made even more remote by destroyed roads and port facilities. In Indonesia, the hardest hit, aid arrived at the airport only to be stuck by the lack of fuel to move it. In Sri Lanka, relief workers complained there was no coordination between the government and aid agencies. In India, the government's midweek warning that more killer waves were on their way sparked widespread panic and sent aid workers fleeing along with residents. Hospitals have collapsed, and electricity is nonexistent. In many places, rescue workers had to bury or burn the growing piles of bodies before they could turn to the needs of the living.
Newly made refugees have crowded into wedding halls, mosques, and schools, and in many of these makeshift camps there were already outbreaks of diarrhea and fever. "Everybody is scared of the diseases that are on the way here. They are more scared about the disease than about the tsunami," says Yoni Sattler, a traveler from Israel who has been helping victims streaming into Bangkok, Thailand. "Bodies are everywhere. Sewage is everywhere. The water is polluted."
One of the first and most pressing issues is just dealing with the dead. "Every day, we are seeing bodies being spat out by the sea," says Satyanarayana Rao, a physician who is heading a relief effort in the town of Ponneri on India's hard-hit east coast. "These bodies are in extremely bad condition, bloated and putrefied. The urgent need is to cremate these as quickly as possible." Terrence DeSilva, deputy director of medical services in Sri Lanka, says that in other natural disasters, the number of injured is usually four times that of the dead, but in this case, the ratio is only 2 to 1. "When people got caught in this tidal wave, there was no chance to be injured," he says. "All who got caught washed to sea, and their bodies washed back." In this Buddhist country, mourners put a white flag outside the house. About 75 percent of the houses on the island, he estimates, are marked with white flags.
Cremation. Everywhere, funeral pyres light the skies, and bulldozers plow mounds of dirt over cities of the dead. As refugees flee the remains of their communities, it has been difficult in some cases finding people to help dispose of bodies rotting in the tropical heat. In Nagapattinam, a town in the worst-hit district of coastal India, sanitation workers from another part of the country were brought in to do the job, but with no sterile gloves or masks, they ran the risk of catching and spreading disease.
An entire generation will suffer the lasting effects of this disaster. Children, who were the least able to withstand the flooding, may account for up to half the dead, and hundreds of thousands have been left as orphans. One aid agency, Save the Children, has been trying to help young survivors locate their families, but this is proving to be a daunting task.
Even with all the immediate medical problems, some doctors say the biggest challenge will be dealing with long-term psychological trauma and lasting fear in these seaside communities. "There is a need for large-scale psychological counseling, since everyone here is in a state of shock," says Rao in India. "Most of the affected are fisherfolk who have seen death coming from the sea, which until now was giving them their livelihood. With most of the 700 dead in this village [Ponneri] being children, the common cry of the survivors is about why they have been left behind. They are still dazed by the events and have not come to terms with the tragedy yet."
Thirty-year-old Krist Dissalayake of Galle, on Sri Lanka's southern tip, saw the water sweep away dozens of buses packed with passengers and describes seeing bodies everywhere. He searched for his mother for four days before finding her body in the hospital. "Her body went to sea and came back, and her face was changed. I couldn't recognize her," he says. "I couldn't take her home. They put the bodies straight into the ground. She was 56 years old."
Grisly photographs of bodies awaiting identification line the walls of the town hall in Phuket, Thailand. A handwritten sign gives the number of Patong hospital, a facility more accustomed to treating cases of sunstroke than handling huge numbers of the dead and seriously injured. In Thailand, almost half the dead are foreigners, mostly European vacationers. Thousands of Americans, however, are still missing in the region. In Sri Lanka, consular officials report that American tourists have shown up at their offices wearing just bathing suits, with no money and no clothes.
U.S. aid. Early in the week, some critics complained that the Bush administration, by failing to offer aid and condolences immediately, botched an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world, especially Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country. The United States made an initial pledge of $35 million while European countries appeared to be outbidding one another, from France's pledge of $57 million up to Britain's promise of $95 million--trumped at week's end by the United States' announcing a fund of at least $350 million. The White House also dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell ,with a delegation including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to the disaster zone to assess relief needs and show American concern.
It may take decades for some of these countries, many heavily dependent on tourism and fishing, to recover--although photos of beach umbrellas sprouting in Thailand offered perverse reassurance. While reconstruction and aid money may fuel economies in the short run, it cannot sustain them. "There is a feeling that a natural disaster brings a boom afterwards, but it's a false boom," says Sumner LaCroix, a senior fellow in economics at the East-West Center in Hawaii. "These are resources taken from places like healthcare, education, food, and clothing. Resources don't just come out of nowhere."
Plus, resources that have been put in over the years to some areas will have to be injected anew. In Aceh, a region plagued by decades of conflict, Save the Children had been running a thriving economic development program. "One group of 27 women in a microenterprise were becoming somewhat successful making oyster sauce," says Tom Alcedo, the nonprofitgroup's Indonesia director. "They were having their weekly meeting talking about the business and what they could do to improve it, and the wave came in and killed 20 of the 27 of them. It's a bit tragic that even after suffering 27 years, there are people resilient enough to continue to improve and get on their feet, and then a natural disaster like this comes in."
For shell-shocked survivors in Meulaboh, resilience still seems a luxury. Rachmul Imam, 12, sits in a relative's house and clutches the one possession he managed to salvage, a sarong. Blinking long-lashed eyes, he describes in a soft, dreamlike voice how the wave came, how he ran down the main street away from it and survived by climbing onto the roof of a house, how it took his father, mother, and younger brother. And then, he just sits.



taken from The Aftermath
by Bay Fang