On the island of Phi Phi the Tsunami seems at first to have happened last week. Arriving off the boat you see divers going down for debris that still fills the harbor and on the shore dozens of volunteers are cleaning up the devastated beach.
I met the owner of a bar there just the other day in Phuket where I’m working and he seemed unhinged by his experience and angry by the Thai government and the larger aid agencies response to the now four-month-old disaster.
“I was paying people for body parts…that they were
just throwing away.”
There’s still seems to be no protocol for what to do with remains and he and others are still finding bits of hair and other things that once belonged to someone.
On December 26 he had slept through the wave – he and his girlfriend had been partying hard and he woke up to water filling the room and he opened the door to see bodies floating by – that is not an image easily lost.
A book has been published of drawings made by children who survived the disaster in Phi Phi Don – almost all of them show a crude crayon colored island surrounded by a sea of floating stick people.
The Bar owner, a Swedish ex-pat, is on his way north to Bangkok to meet, yet again, with officials in the government to try to get some answers and help, but he doesn’t seem the least bit hopeful. Where is all that money going?
One thing: the Government is allocating several million for a memorial statute. There is considerable debate as to how to prioritize the money and the more popular Phuket beaches are the winner and Phi Phi Don is the looser – but I have been working in villages north of Phuket for a week now with broken tools and too few people and so much more to do.
And farther south Sumatra isolates itself like a sick animal that hides to die.
There is a spectacular view of Phi Phi Don on one of it’s mountains, but first you have to cross it’s denuded beach, walk past belongings not yet picked up, past shells of buildings and cross a make-shift bridge made with whatever scrap lumber was lying around. This is now a place ripe for the Army Corp of Engineers. But then after a leg cramping flight of stairs up the hill, the whole island comes into view. Ko Phi Phi is a butterfly shaped mass with two sharp jagged green mountains – it’s wings, connected by a flat strip of sand in the middle. All the worst hit areas on December 26 were an accident of geography and it was Ko Phi Phi’s bad luck to have it’s fragile, thin, sandy body, where much of the people lived, exposed to the fullmight of the coming wave from both ends.
Now it’s back to it’s larval stage. The rebirth of the community here reminds me of the novel “The beach” where a make shift semi-Utopian group of survivors try to remake their world in their own way. In fact a smaller island near Phi Phi Don was where the movie based on the book was filmed. Carlitos, the name of that previously mentioned bar, reopened with just a bucket of beer on ice and a table. Little businesses pop up out of nowhere inbetween abandoned buildings. Today hundreds of people arrive to stay at repaired guest houses and spend the day picking up trash, fixing roads and homes. It’s quite a thrilling thing to see a rebirth and after four months of therapeutic self-reliance the fear on the ground is that the distant powers-that-be will finally arrive in force and fuck it up for everyone.
The island was initially evacuated and the Thai survivors returned only a few weeks ago – none wanting to come back till the end of three month mourning period when the spirits of the dead are said to return. What both the dead and the living will find is a new community with a lot of hope and a lot of anger and a lot more work to be done.