- Waves continue to charge across the globe. It will take hours for the tsunami to reach the shores of Sri Lanka, then southern Indian, then the Maldives and finally Africa.
Then as the sea retreats, survivors begin to search for family and friends. They comb hospitals, homeless camps, morgues. They’ll pin up photographs, run classified ads and post Internet messages. Untold thousands never will be found.
Amcha Pramongkit clings to all that remains from his wife of 10 years – a blue T-shirt and a photograph of her dead body.
The shirt, with the slogan on the back – “Same Same Only Different” – was his wife’s uniform at the tourist dive shop where she worked that day. It’s how Pramongkit, 35, recognized her corpse amid the hundreds of bodies outside a Thai temple that acts as a makeshift morgue.
Pramongkit had been home when he heard waves as loud as a jet plane. They bore down on his seaside shack, roaring inland, taller than a coconut tree. He ran, was knocked over but made it to the roof of a building.
After the waves disappeared, Pramongkit spent the next weeks searching for his wife until he found her among the dead at the temple.
Now, Pramongkit, once a fisherman, spends his days in a camp for displaced people in the jungle-shrouded mountains miles from the sea.
He says he’ll never to the water. Not after this.
In Thailand, experts initially couldn’t identify 4,000 bodies. Two months later only 575 had been claimed by families. Forensic teams from around the globe expect to work for years at matching names with bodies at a massive morgue in the town of Phuket.
Everywhere there are reminders of the missing.
In Phuket International Airport stands a bulletin board with hundreds of images of missing tourists. Pleas are written in English, French and German. All the space on the board is filled. Papers are tacked upon others.
“Missing husband and daughter from Berlin,” reads one notice. “Andreas Hupe, 29-years-old. Brown eyes. Wedding ring. Majastolte Hube, 5 year old, curly blond hair. Maybe she can’t hear you.”
Below is a color photo of dad holding his daughter’s hand in front of a waterfall. Another shows the curly haired girl waving to the camera and a close up of a wedding ring.
In Indonesia, more than 94,000 people were listed as missing in early March.
Bodies are recovered every day. But there is no effort to identify them. The bloated and unrecognizable corpses are hauled away in white bags, piled into trucks and taken to the outskirts of town where they are buried in
mass graves.
Eka Susila, 25, leads a body-recovery team for the Indonesian Red Cross and says it would be impossible to do the kind of genetic work being done in Thailand.
“They find almost 3,000 bodies a day,” he says in a conversation a month after the tsunami. “If they have to check them one by one, it will take a long time.”
Bodies would pile up and the chance of disease would increase, he says.
Sometimes, he says, bodies come to him in his dreams.
“They say, ‘Help me,'” he says.
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