TSUNAMI IMPACT: Child Survivors Carry Scars

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BAAN BANG MUANG, Thailand , Dec 26 2005 (IPS) - Her drawings of the sea offer a window into the mind of a nine-year-old child whose life was shattered when the Asian tsunami flattened her coastal village on the morning after Christmas Day, last year.

Before the December 2004 tsunami, Mukda Thongsrikaew saw the beach as a pleasant scene. Her crayons depicted a calm blue ocean, a yellow sun with a smile on its face, and tourists and orange crabs lazing on a bed of light brown sand.

But since the disaster, which killed her mother and 17 other close relatives in this fishing village, the sea has taken on a menacing look for Mukda. With a blue ballpoint pen and a steady hand, she draws a sea with three huge waves bearing down on the coast. Each wave is dotted with human forms, cars, trees and other uprooted objects.

This sense of a friendly sea transformed into a monster is lasting. ‘’I go near the sea now but I don’t play in the water like before,” Mukda said during lunch hour at the Baan Bang Muang School in the southern Phang Nga province.

Mukda’s struggle to recover from the tsunami is a feeling shared by 49 other children in this primary school who lost one or both parents when the sea ravaged their community.

Their school was propelled from being an obscure institution of 640 students into the post-tsunami media glare for a reason other than the large number of orphans. The giant waves also killed 51 of their schoolmates, the highest death toll among schools that lost students to the natural disaster.

Phang Nga was the worst affected of Thailand’s provinces along the Andaman coast, losing 5,880 people out of the country’s total tsunami death toll of over 8,300. In all, 1,400 Thai children were orphaned.

The scale of the tragedy has brought with it new challenges for teachers like Jongkonnee Limpanich, who have been compelled to devise new and sensitive measures for the school curriculum to help children affected by the tsunami.

‘’We find ourselves taking on the role of mothers to help the children who have lost parents,” says Jongkonnee, head of academic affairs and curriculum development at the Baan Bang Muang School. ‘’We began to make more home visits to help children feeling lonely, not sure of themselves and sometimes depressed.”

At the same time, the teachers in this school had to find answers to other challenges that arose – the sense of envy and jealousy displayed by some students towards the tsunami victims. ‘’These children kept asking why their parents did not die from the tsunami when they saw orphaned children receiving a lot of attention,” adds Jongkonnee. ‘’So we had teachers explaining to these students that the loss of parents cannot be compensated.”

But as communities mark the first anniversary of that unprecedented natural disaster, affected Thai children appear to have adjusted better to the loss of their parents and relatives than children in other tsunami ravaged countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India.

Thai children are ‘’beginning to recover emotionally from their country’s worst-ever disaster” than the children in the other three countries, states the United Nations Children’s Fund in a survey released last week. ‘'(The) children in Thailand had the most positive outlook and optimistic view of the future.” the survey said but also found that ”three-quarters of Thai respondents still grieve over the loss of family members.”

There is a need to ensure that all affected children receive their due in Thailand’s post-tsunami recovery effort. ‘’Blind spots are developing, meaning that some children and schools are missing out on what has been promised to them by government and civil society,” Jan Boontinand, of the international development agency ActionAid, told IPS.

Children forgotten in the Thai recovery and rehabilitation effort include those living in the poorer provinces of the northeast but had parents working in the Phuket-Phang Nga tourist belt that was utterly devastated.

‘’Some children have received little or no aid because they are difficult to identify or their status not recorded,” Ora-orn Poocharoen, a lecturer at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said in an interview. ‘’A child living in northeast Thailand whose parents were construction workers who died in Phang Nga during the tsunami is bound not to receive any help at all because he or she is not attending one of the directly affected schools of Phang Nga.”

Another flaw in the recovery plan, that has been pointed out, is failure to involve children adequately ‘’By ignoring children’s energy, strength and optimism, we have all missed a great opportunity to reduce the impact of the disaster, and may have actually prolonged (their) suffering,” stated Plan International, a global development agency that focus on children, in a mid-December report.

For child victims like Mukda, the goodwill and support that has poured forth from the Thai government and voluntary groups will not replace what she pines for the most. ‘’I always liked hugging my mother,” she says, looking at the floor.