BAN NAM KHEM (Thailand): Six months after the Indian Ocean tsunami swept away her parents and home, Suwanee Maliwan has a new one-room house courtesy of the Thai army, but is still too scared to live in it. “I don’t want to move back to my house by the beach because I’m afraid of another tsunami,” said the shy 12-year-old, who lost 21 relatives in the Dec 26 disaster. “People have been saying another one will come by the end of the year.”
Instead of moving back to the concrete buildings hastily thrown up by Thai troops in this devastated fishing village, she and hundreds others have chosen to stay far from the sea in a shanty-like temporary housing camp.
More than 1,000 people share just 20 toilets in the former tented village, where thin plywood walls are all that seperate families and corrugated iron roofs all that protect them from the blazing sun or pouring monsoon rains.
At night, the air is thick with mosquitoes and fresh water is scarce, but fear of the sea is too strong for both Suwanee and her 61-year-old grandfather, Hin Temna, a fisherman who says he will never again return to the sea.
“I’m too scared to fish. If I get some money I would like to open a convenience store in my house,” said Hin, who is trying to shepherd his granddaughter through the trauma and loneliness on the money he earns as an odd-job man in the village.
Suwanee and her grandfather received 40,000 baht ($1,000) from the government in compensation for the death of her parents.
The pair have put the money aside for Suwanee’s education, for which they will also receive from a special Thai army scholarship programme for orphans who lost both their parents.
But her mind is still stuck on the past, in particular her parents, who went to sea one morning six months ago never to return. Their bodies have never been recovered.
Suwanee has tried to keep mementoes of her mother and father — floor tiles from the family home, a notebook with jottings about her loved ones. Unfortunately, these too have disappeared.
“I’m really upset that I lost the tiles from my house because they were chosen by my mother and they really reminded me of her,” she said.
“I’m afraid that over time I will forget things about my parents. I want to remember everything. I used to write things down in a notebook but I lost that too.”—Reuters
