December 29, 2004
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I’m sorry. The tsunami disaster is so utterly devastating the horror has left me lost for words. What’s the death toll – 77,000 now? And still rising. The papers carried a picture of a friend and her sister who spoke of their narrow escape in Phuket, Thailand, where thousands among whom were tourists perished. British actor and film director Richard Attenborough lost his 14-year old granddaughter, his daughter, and her mother-in-law in Phuket.
Reports say most of the tourists were from Europe. For every Thai who died, two were foreigners, so Thai authorities were saying. The pictures and videos are heart wrenching. Sri Lanka and Indonesia suffered the greatest loss of lives and property. The magnitude of the destruction is unimaginable – whole villages washed away.
In Malaysia, 3-storey high waves hit the beaches of Penang in Batu Ferringhi mainly and swept over fifty people away. These were families enjoying a day at the beach during the year-end holidays. Unaccustomed to tidal waves in this part of the world, much less tsunamis, stories were told of children and adults who ran to the beach for a closer look when unusually long line of white-capped waves sped landward.
There were also pockets of destruction in the holiday island of Langkawi, coastal areas in Kedah and Perak, with some deaths. You could say we were comparatively lucky. But a man who lost almost all his family of eight in Penang asked, “What did we do to deserve this?”
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