It is a light blue sky, a soft bank of sand, a wonderful ocean. We are beached here, each of us slanted on bamboo mats, absorbing the glow of the sun, eyes closed and alone. It is a break in the program, a moment when we ritually grab our books and towels, mats and cream and walk down the tarmac driveway to the beach. A road that, a year ago, was all covered in water, with garbage, with sections of demolished houses, and with slumped, broken bodies.
Things are getting on here in Phang Nga, the Thai province worst hit by the tsunamis a year ago today. Permanent housing is slowly rising up, cookie-cutter residences whose layout and design depend on the group who is funding their construction - Rotary, Tsunami Volunteers Foundation, the Royal Army, the Princess of Thailand (her special colour is mauve, and her houses match in a strikingly flamboyant bodypaint). Foundations of all sorts have been established, and are being established - occupying women with handicrafts, helping kids with art-therapy, promoting culture with special centres and schools. Little clumps of volunteers from across Thailand and the world are still scurrying like insects to clean up shoes, bottles, and housing & boat detritus from the beaches, jungles and mangroves. Christian aid organisations are still quietly handing out bibles, men are still praying for fishing boats, and many children are still not really smiling, and definitely no longer swimming in the ocean. It has been a year and a lot of work has been done here along the Andaman Sea. But most incredible is the excruciating amount of work that is still left to be done.
In Ban Tung Wa, where we have spent a bit of time, various groups of Morgan people are learning to adapt to their new village, and with it their new lives as Thai citizens. The Morgan, a traditionally nomadic sea-living group of people with a distinct culture, language and religion, have for years been denied citizenship by both the Thai and Burmese governments, thus rendering them invisible, and excluding them from schools, health care systems, and so on. Having been veritably slammed on wave-day, the Morgan people began to be noticed by Thais for the first time, and when it became clear that their lack of citizenship meant that nobody could tell in any way how many of their people had died the government caved and decided to register them all, at last. The past few days have marked the official opening of Ban Tung Wa, a group of pretty wooden huts built up by the main road in Khao Lak, tucked away from the ocean - these 'sea gypsies' having been traumatised away from their traditional island and beach homes. The people again have homes, the kids are in schools - the Morgan are obviously glad to be re-settling down. The worry among the people, however, is what will continue to be lost in this tradeoff, as children learn to speak and act Thai, and the many traditions of the people are gradually abandoned. Suddenly with identity cards, just as the very essence of their identity is most at risk.
We are a group of 23, from Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Sweden, Italy and the USA. We range, in age, from 19 to 57, and we certainly range in our reactions and attitudes regarding disaster and development. So far our activities have been scattered and largely touristic; far from developing strong relationships with local orphans as we were all prepared for, we have been hightailing it up and down the coast in air-conditioned vans, visiting villages and displacement camps, meeting chiefs and teachers, hearing stories of loss and survival. Still: there have been more fulfilling pockets of engagement. A wonderful afternoon spent playing games and painting pictures with a group of children who live in a brand new, extremely ordered and suburban looking village, watching as they filled the pages with images of boats they want for New Year, of massive waves shadowing palms and huts (still), of rainbows and kites and something that looked like a BBQ. Christmas morning was spent on a sublime Khao Lak beach, diamond blue water curving gracefully in a wide bay, me in my underwear wading through semi-stagnant beach inlets stabbing broken buoys with sticks and trudging for trash while striped fish darted around my legs. And so on: tomorrow we begin a short burst of English lessons at two schools in a nearby Thai Muslim communitee, and then over New Years we will be holding a two day camp for Morgan children in a National Park. We continue to jump around, frantically getting the full 'tsunami development' experience, and trying, as hard as we all can, to make, where ever we can, some sort of small impact, a task which is seemingly impossible with such a scattered approach.
Its the night discussions that are the most infuriating, as we all sit and well-meaningly try to solve the problems by talking about them and spouting largely uninformed (and often ethnocentic) opinions on What Has Been and What Should Be Done. But, it is on post-meeting downtime at the beach, staring into the night surf that I realise that it is indeed this portion of the project that we are bound to actually take the most from, as we realise the agony and challenges of working together and the difficulties attached to coming into any developing community armed with the desire to 'help'. And that our fleeting glimpse at post-tsunami life, as limited in delivering positive change as it may be, can only, thankfully, be as limited in its negative impact, and that once expectations are remodeled and we all realise that we are tourists, and that this is a tourist experience, but that we can learn a great deal from it as such, it is easier to see that this can be, and is bound to be, a great and important experience for us all.
(The Standard Line Delivery Corporation would like to wish both the subscribers and casual readers of our electronic periodical a snug, safe and spiritually fulfilling Christmas, and a Super New Year to boot.)
