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Another sunny day in Thailand

Posted by Alexis on June 28, 2005 at 4:25 am |

Well, it’s still the rainy season, but you’d never know it this week. It has been sunny and gorgeous, but HOT. Clay and I escaped for the weekend to a beach further south, Railay, to actually enjoy rather than avoid the water. The beaches here are still very unsafe for swimming or even running on, both because of the fierce currents this time of year, and the tons of debris (literally) that are on the ocean floor and still washing ashore every day. So far, beach clean up efforts in this area have collected and removed over 50 metric tons of trash, but this undertaking is still far from complete. There are many things known and unknown beneath the water, including parts of resorts and housing (concrete blocks, tin roofs, TV sets, etc.), trees, boats, and the like, but diving clean ups cannot resume until after the end of the monsoon season in October. Sadly, this means that many of the beaches of Khao Lak are not (yet!) where we want to spend our days off.

So we headed to the next province south, Krabi, for some time in the water. I had visited Railay with my parents last year and not much appeared to have changed since the tsunami. However, there has already been a lot of clean up and rebuilding, which disguises most of the damage that area incurred. Although it is the low season now, many people commented on the lack of tourists compared to previous low seasons, which is unfortunate for both business owners and travelers because it was certainly as dramatically beautiful as I remembered it.

I continue to work half of my week at the same construction site, Tap Tawaan. Yesterday, I spent the day rendering walls, which I learned, means to cover the cement-block walls that we built with a thick layer of cement. It was much harder than it looked (and I ended up covered in quite a bit of cement), but by the end of the day I had mostly caught on, so hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be a pro. I have also been able to learn a little more about the village we are helping to rebuild.

Prior to the tsunami, there were around 120 people living in Tap Tawaan. The village was completely destroyed and about 40 people died in the disaster. It is home to some of the Moklen people, one of three groups who were traditionally sea nomads, but now live in semi-permanent settlements along the Andaman Sea coast - the Moken, the Moklen, and the Uruk Lawoi. The groups have distinct languages and cultural traditions, but most of them now also speak Thai and hold Thai citizenship. There are rumblings of land disputes between these people, who apparently have no proof of ownership of the land on which they have lived for approximately 100 years, and land speculators. I personally have seen little evidence of these disputes, but they apparently provide a tense undercurrent to many of the rebuilding projects.

This past Sunday marked six months since the tsunami. This chronological benchmark is of more significance to Westerners than Thais, who consider 100 days to be more momentous than monthly intervals. But it gave me a reason to pause and think about what has happened since then, what is happening here now, and what role, if any, I can play in healing the wounds incurred on December 26th. I don’t have a clear answer. I can see evidence of what happened here, but obviously can have little real understanding of what people experienced and saw and how it continues to affect them. I can only hope that by being here, whether merely as a consumer supporting the local businesses as I go about my day - buying food, staying in a guesthouse, using the internet – or in talking to people who live here, or by working at a construction site, where there are certainly people with better construction skills than myself, that I am helping someone else in some small way.

For now,
alexis