Bloggin' from the Road [a tsunami update]

[from chris]

This week I have been in southern Thailand surveying the damage and representing a ministry committed to help the rebuilding process. I have learned more about Thai politics than I thought I would ever know [especially with Thai elections next week] while waiting for final approval of the building project. The project includes 44 houses in the devastated area of Bangsak in the Takuapa distric of Thailand. This area only lost 40 people of the nearly 300. 24 are confirmed dead and 16 are still missing. There is not a single house in this part of the village standing. The one remnant of buildings ever being there, other than the rubble, is a bathroom. This morning as I drove by, the bathroom was still lying sideways, remaining intact after the wave hit, with the toilet and sink still attached to the walls. It flew off of its foundation into an SUV nearly a hundred feet away. The SUV looks just like you would imagine a car hit by a 8ft concrete box at a hundred miles per hour would look.
Across the street, over half a mile from the beach, it looks at first glance as if one building made it through the tsunami. But a moment later I noticed the entire backside of the building was blown apart. The water pressure was so great that it broke every window in the two story building and then threw the bricks of the back wall apart and then carried them a half mile into the jungle. By the second day I was there I stopped seeing this phenomena as abnormal because so many buildings like this litter the 40 mile coast I have been traveling. Hundreds of shops with steel garage doors still have the doors blown into the shop and the back walls missing a month after the tsunami hit.
A few miles further south, the skeletons of the 87 hotels in the area pollute the otherwise peaceful ocean views. Hundreds of beachside bungalows [some costing as much as $1000 a night] used to line the shore, but now all that remains are the poured concrete pads.
Yesterday a friend of mine wandered the beach and within an hour found 3 passports just laying in a bed of trees. There are countless others, buried, never to be found, from the almost 3000 tourist who died on these beaches last month. Everyday since I have been here a new body has been found.
I don't really know how else to explain the devastation here. Obviously, my words can only offer a shell the reality of the pain still going on here. Everyday I see the faces of those who have lost their possessions, friends, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Life is not back to normal here. I don't think it ever will be. Not for these people. Yes, in a few months the houses will be rebuilt and the Thais will be out of the refugee camps, but as much as the Buddhist culture demands forgetfulness of the past, it will never happen. These people will always live in the shadow of the tsunami.