For me, Thailand has always been a place of intrigue. In the midnineties, I fell in love with the culture, the people, and Muay Thai, the country’s ancient art of combat. I had come this time at the end of November 2004 to compete one last time in the fighting stadiums and to write a book on their training methods. I jumped around the islands for a few weeks, and then went on a trek through the northern jungles to clear my thoughts. Emerging from the jungle two days after Christmas, I found a group of hills tribesmen huddled around a television in the market of a small village. They cried and gripped one another, and as I entered their midst, I caught my first glimpse of the unthinkable disaster that had unfolded. In the days that followed, I saw several families, so poor they could hardly put food on the table, pull money from mattresses and jars so they could send it to the relief foundations. When I returned to Chiang Mai, the largest city in the north, thousands hurried to the post office to send off large portions of their savings. Their utter commitment to help one another astounded me. The entire country was in tears.
Arriving at the island of Phuket, I asked around about how I could get involved in relief efforts, and the trail led to one woman—Sudthida “Nui” Somsakserm, a local restaurant owner who had been commuting every day from the big island to the beaches of Khao Lak. Some trips, she brought food and clothes and baby formula to the survivors. Other days, she brought bottled water for rescue workers and dry ice to preserve the bodies. The morning after we met, I helped her load box lunches into her truck and we headed out. I had studied natural disasters in college, and while living in a dozen third-world countries over the past decade, I had seen villages leveled by earthquakes and floods, but nothing could have prepared me for what I encountered as we rounded the crest of Khao Lak Mountain. Looking down upon the devastated beaches of Bang Niang and Bang Sak, I didn’t know how anyone could have survived.
Nui took me to a couple of the temporary camps that had been established. My hands began to tremble as I talked with people who had lost their mothers or daughters or best friends just a few weeks before. Naively, I had brought money. They needed food. They needed clothes. They needed shelter. By the time we carried the lunches to Doctor Pornthip and the other doctors working at Yanyao Temple, where nearly 5,000 bodies were being stored, my emotions had completely run away from me. I was constantly wiping tears from my face. I wanted to know who needed the most help, and while at the temple, I heard several people mention the village of Nam Khem. It was comprised of local people, and with all the reporters and rescue workers hovering around the resorts further south, it had apparently been forgotten. I asked Nui if she had been to the village, and she told me that she had tried to head down the narrow road just a few days after the tsunami. A police officer told her not to bother, that there was nothing left down there. I asked her if we could go and try to find out what the people needed so we could bring it the following day, and she hesitantly agreed. Having grown up in the area during the tin-mining boom, she still feared the village. She could remember having seen a few bodies being hauled up to the highway in the back of a sawngthaew early one Saturday morning when she was eight.
When we got there, there was nearly nothing left, just rubble piled on top of rubble. Not sure where to begin, we headed toward one of the few homes still standing, and it was there that I met Ko Sa, Puek’s loyal friend. He had lost thirteen fishing boats, and most of his ninety employees were missing or dead. He had opened the doors to his home and offered shelter to anyone brave enough to come back to the village. A handful of fishermen had taken Ko Sa up on his offer, and he fed them three times a day with the little money he still had. His generosity and massive heart inspired me, and I wanted to give him something in return. I offered to help rebuild some of his boats so he could get back on his feet. Ko Sa turned me down outright. He considered himself the richest man in the village, because he hadn’t lost anyone in his family. He steered Nui and me toward someone who needed help a whole lot more.
A few hours later, Nui and I were sitting down talking with Puek and Lek. I noticed that their hands trembled from stress, but they tried their best to conceal it. Throughout the course of a long conversation, we learned their stories. But despite their suffering, they wanted nothing from us. They were just happy that someone had dropped by to talk. They hoped that we would come back and share some time, but there were others worse off.
When we met Wimon a few days later, he had the same selfless attitude. He needed a boat to get his family back on its feet, but he did not once ask for anything. What he did do, however, was send us off to talk with Dang, who was currently battling the Far East Company and the leader of the village for her family’s survival. He figured she needed help a whole lot more. We followed his instructions, and when we sat down with Dang, we could see the grief and fear in her eyes. She too wanted our friendship, nothing more.
After hearing Dang’s story, we decided to visit with the leader of Nam Khem, Sathaien Petklieng, to see why the residents of Laem Pom were being denied donations. While waiting for him to arrive, we met Wichien. He lived just around the corner from the tent where the leader conducted business, and he invited us to his home to survey the damage. There we met Nang and their son, Nueng. We ended up talking for several hours, and by the time we left, we were all good friends.
Over the course of the next month, Nui and I talked with dozens of Nam Khem families that had lost everything. We realized that it was beyond our means to help everyone, and although it was a difficult decision to make, we decided to focus mostly on the four families we had first met. Nui has an unbelievable network of friends, and within a few weeks she had collected several hundred thousand baht. We figured that the money, combined with our savings, might be enough to help one of the families get back on their feet, but certainly not all of them. Nui then aligned herself with several rotary clubs that wanted to give donations but hadn’t the slightest clue how to go about getting that money to the right people. A good friend of mine, Brooke Motta, had started a foundation back in the States called Compassion in Action, and she flew over with a sizable amount of donations. Glen Cordoza, the friend whom I had first come to Thailand with, joined the mix with the money he had raised over the phone from friends and relatives back home. And then Leland Ratcliff, an old college buddy with a strong back, came over to help with the grunt labor.
We all became fixtures in Nam Khem.
By this point, Nui and I had become close friends with Puek and Lek, and they took all of us in. When in the area, we stayed with them at their temporary housing camp. Since the disaster, at least twice a week a foreigner or a government official had come to their small shack, collected their house register and their other documents, photocopied them at their expense, and then had Lek sign her name at the bottom. But nothing ever came of all those signed documents, and she began to wonder if crooks were using them to collect money in her name. She and Puek grew more worried by the day, more bored by the hour. They spent countless hours just sitting there, swatting mosquitoes. Puek began to feel his sanity slipping away again, so he asked a friend to steal him one of the coffin lids they had deposited in a huge pile behind the temple. Puek had a foreigner write on it in English, “I am a tsunami victim and professional masseuse. I give massages for 100 baht,” and then he nailed it to the front of his shack.
Every time we came by, Puek and Lek greeted us with huge smiles and insisted on feeding us despite their small rations. They refused to take our donations, so eventually we started getting a couple of massages each time we turned up in order to get them to accept our money. Their daughter, Chomphu, came down from Bangkok to help support them, and she and Brooke bonded immediately. Using a portion of the money she had collected from friends, Nui contacted Chomphu’s university in Bangkok and paid for two semesters so she could return to school. Nui also used the money donated by the Rotary clubs to build Puek a forty-foot longtail boat, which would be captained by Lek’s brother Jui. Brooke’s foundation, Compassion in Action, put in a large sum of money to help build them a new home, which they moved into at the end of June, after six months at the camp. They thanked us repeatedly, but we told them that it wasn’t our doing. It was the hundreds of people in Thailand and around the world who had been so generous in the wake of this disaster. Before we parted ways, Nui received from Puek a copy of his medical reports in the hopes of finding a surgeon who could restore his vision so he could again support his family out at sea. She passed it on to several of her doctor friends, but she was informed that hospitals in Thailand weren’t yet capable of performing the operation. The reports were translated into English, and all of us are currently on the hunt to find a doctor in the United States willing to perform the operation.
We didn’t spend as much time with Wimon and Watcharee, but the moments we did spend with them were warm and genuine. They continued to live with Wimon’s mother and their daughter at the temporary housing camp that had been built at Nam Khem Temple. Many people had heard Wimon’s story through Mr. Sorayuth, and they came by frequently to offer him money. He told each of them that the money would help his family greatly, but he could not accept it. He told them that the people in Laem Pom needed it much more than he did, and then he gave them directions on how to get there. Mr. Sorayuth had also donated a staggering 8,300,000 baht to the village of Nam Khem, but it did little more than tear their community further apart. Some people thought that the families that had suffered the worst should get the most money, and other people thought that everyone in the village should receive an equal amount. Bitter feuds erupted, and Wimon couldn’t stand watching the little that remained of his village getting torn apart by bickering. He made a suggestion to Mr. Sorayuth that he not give the money to the families but rather use it down the road to build a public park or something they could all benefit from. Mr. Sorayuth took his advice.
Wimon wanted to lift his family back up with his own two hands, but that would be impossible until he got a boat. At one point, he had heard that a foreign man had donated fifteen longtail boats to the village, so Wimon had instantly gone down to the leader’s tent and signed his name on a list to receive one of the boats. When he didn’t hear anything back, he went to ask the leader where all the boats had gone. The leader couldn’t tell him, and it led Wimon to believe that the leader had actually taken the boats for himself. Wimon became even angrier when he heard that people had actually sold the longtails they’d received from generous foreigners.
Wimon grew more desperate by the day. The heavy rains started in March, and the roof of his plywood shack had sprung numerous leaks. One morning, he awoke to find his mother nearly drowning in a pool of water. He continued his hunt for a longtail, and then, one afternoon in March, he met a group of men who wanted to rent him a boat. They told him that he could keep all the fish that he caught, but he had to pay them 3,000 baht per month. Wimon took a look at the boat and saw that it was brand new. He knew then that one of the men in this group had most likely received the boat through a donation, and once again he felt his blood boil. He doubted that the person who had donated the boat had intended the recipient to rent it out at a large price to a fellow tsunami victim. Wimon needed the work, but he refused to get it unethically. He turned the offer down and resumed the hunt. By the middle of June, he still hadn’t been out to sea, and his mother woke up just as wet every morning in their plywood shack. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Nui had been building him a boat out of the rotary club donations. She had been given a 70,000 baht budget for the boat, but it ended up being 120,000 baht. For a while there, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to have it finished, but after draining the last of her savings and receiving money from Compassion in Action, she ended up paying the boat builder the last of the money she owed him.
On June 20, we transported the boat to Nam Khem. Wimon was so touched that he burst out in tears. His mother fell to her knees. A few days later, while making my way through Nam Khem, I spotted Wimon by his boat with a can of lacquer, painting each nook and cranny with delicate care. He had lost so much, yet he took such pride in his work. In that moment, I knew that he and his family would be just fine.
Out in Laem Pom, Dang’s struggles continued. Every day, she fought for water, food, and building supplies. The article written about her community had faded from the country’s collective mind. Sathaien Petklieng, the leader of Nam Khem, continued to prohibit donations from reaching them. The community members flew a pirate flag high above their community for all to see, and Dang promised not to take it down until the embargo was lifted. Each of the families did what they could to start life anew, but for many the trauma of having lost their family and friends, combined with their battle with the Far East Company, became too much to bear. This was the case with an eighteen-year-old boy who had returned with Dang to Laem Pom. Unable to cope with the grief, he hung himself from a tree on May 20.
We spent a lot of time with Dang, trying to lift her spirits. Brooke, Glen, and Leland set up a tent next to Dang and spent their days helping lay cement foundations. During their stay, a thug everyone suspected to have been hired by the Far East Company came into Laem Pom to scare residents away. Glen and Leland, both having fallen in love with the people of Laem Pom, wanted to challenge the man, but Dang held them back.
To help with the cost of building supplies, Compassion in Action stepped in, and we all donated money of our own, but the help they needed was much larger than four people could provide. The day we left, Dang was all smiles, but the pain in her eyes remained just as strong as the first day we had met her. As with thousands of other residents in Nam Khem, her future would remain uncertain for some time to come.
Things had improved for Wichien and Nang. They had replaced the walls of their home, and our group surprised Wichien one day with a refrigerator and some other household supplies. Wichien’s job working for the leader and Nang’s job collecting trash had both come to an end, but Wichien landed another job on the other side of the isthmus, diving for sand used for ceramics. He spent a lot of his time away worrying about looters and the possibility of another wave, but he always felt better when he returned home and Nang gave him a big hug and kiss. Wichien no longer went to church every Sunday, but he continued to read the Bible. Nang waited for the day when Wichien would allow her to become a Buddhist again.
Although these four families were given a little help along the road to rebuilding their lives, hundreds of other families still struggled to get the basic necessities. Six months after the tsunami had washed over Nam Khem and claimed nearly 5,000 of its residents, the fate of the village was still uncertain. Soldiers had built hundreds of homes, but fewer than 200 families had returned. With few jobs to be found, residents feared losing the handouts that continued to trickle into the camps. They also feared another wave. At least twice a month, mass-scale rumors circulated of earthquakes in Indonesia and massive waves spotted just offshore. Few hesitated to run to the hills, and in their absence, criminals moved freely through the abandoned streets.
December 26 had come and gone for most of the world, but for the residents of Nam Khem, there will be no forgetting. When asked if they thought their village would survive, most residents gave the same answer—only time will tell.