OT: I just read one of the most amazing things I've ever rea

[Guest Anonymous]

...Well this is my first big OFF TOPIC post ever. I figured I'd wait until there was something pretty compelling.

This is unbelievable.

There is a newsletter that goes out regularly to the humongous community of people that go the the Burning Man art/creativity/experiment/festival/party/city/whathaveyou event in the Nevada desert. Apparently one of the people who helps run the entrance to the event had just settled down to his new home near the beach in Thailand when the tsunami hit. This is his incredible, riveting, first-hand account.

Read it all. It's absolutely amazing. I can't even begin to imagine...

PEARL'S STORY:

Sitting around, day after Christmas, just staring at the TV, some movie

we've seen before. Mid-morning, post-breakfast stupor controlling Karin and me.

The power flickers and we moan. We'll have to get up and do something?

Then we hear some yelling outside.

I look out the front door, still puffed up with pride about our new

house, just 400 feet back from the beach. People are running up our

street yelling. It looks like a fire at the large two-story resort that

effectively blocks our view of the beach. Smoke and dust coming up and

all these people.

Then a small line of really brown water comes rolling toward us. That's

weird. But I reckon it must be some strange full-moon high tide. So we

go upstairs so we don't get wet. I look out the window and try and take

some pictures. There is a quiet rumble to it, like those white-noise

generators that are supposed to help you sleep. The water is getting

higher and higher and then it destroys our friend's cement bungalow!

Then our front door caves in, and then water is coming up the stairs!

This was the last point my brain worked for a long time.

We try and throw a mattress out the window to float on, but the water

is rising too fast, and out the window we climb. It's all going so

fast. It's faster than conscious thought and by the time we are on our

second-story roof, the water is coming out the window. We jump.

Karin doesn't jump at the same time or did I jump too early? We're

separated. I scream her name, but the crashing roiling water mutes me.

I can't hear her. I scream and scream until I get hit by something and

pulled under. I can't swim to the top, I pull myself through trash and

wood to the surface and off I go.

Ahead are trees wrapped in flotsam and as I look a Thai guy is

struggling to get free of it, as I pass by at 30 mph I realize he is

impaled on a piece of wood and can't even scream.

My brain shut down when Karin disappeared, and now all I can do is

survive. Something triggers and I swim. I swim to avoid the trees that

will trap me, possibly kill me. It seems that I am atop the crest of

the tsunami, which is less like a wave than a flood.

From on high I can see the water hit buildings, then rise, then watch

the buildings collapse into piles of concrete and rebar. I swim to

avoid these. Left and right I paddle, looking ahead the whole time

trying to figure the hazards. None of this is conscious, this isn't me

thinking it out, it's some recessed part of the brain coming out and

taking control.

I was busy seeing the weird things, like massive diesel trucks being

rolled end over end. Or the car launched through the second-story wall

of a former luggage shop. Or the person high up in a standing tree in a

lurid orange thong. Or the older foreigner who got stuck in the wood

and steel wrapped around a tree, and then his body torn off while his

head remained. I couldn't scream.

I was pulled under, my pants caught on something. I decided that this

was neither the place nor time for me to die, and ripped my pants off.

I surfaced into a hunk of wood, which cut my forehead. Some people

reached out to me, and I back, but the water was too fast and erratic.

Some people screamed for help and I told them to swim. Some people just

stared with empty eyes, watching what happened, but seeing nothing.

Some were just floating bodies.

At some point, I passed a guy, cut on his cheek, holding onto big piece

of foam. We just made eye contact and shrugged apathetically at each

other. Then I turned ahead to watch fate. When I looked back he was

gone.

Trees were pulled down, and their flotsam added to the flow. I was hit

by a refrigerator and pushed toward a building that was collapsing. I

swam and swam and swam and swam and still was pushed right toward a

huge clump of jagged sticks and metal. I was pulled under, kicked

toward the mass, cut my feet and kicked again. I popped up on the other

side, spun around and pulled under again.

Down there, I knew it was not the time, and I pulled my way up through

the floating rubbish of my former town. I pulled and pulled and my

lungs ached for air.

This went on for seeming weeks. Time simply left the area alone. I

grabbed the edge of a mattress and floated. Breathing, just breathing.

Awareness brought back by the sound and look of a waterfall.

Trying to push up onto the mattress more and more, and it took my

weight less and less. Tumbling over the edge, sucked under again, and

out I shot, swirled into a coconut grove, where the water seemed to

have stopped. There was even a dyke-like wall around the grove.

The water spun and churned, but went nowhere and got no higher. It

wasn't swimming, or climbing, but something in between. I made my way

to the land. Every step had to be careful with broken glass everywhere

and sheet metal poking out. It was a long, slow struggle.

The low rumble had stopped, and now is the occasional creak of wood on

wood and metal scraping. Moans came across the new brown lake. A small

boy was in a tree crying, asking for his parents in Norwegian.

I climbed up onto the dyke and looked around. I screamed out for Karin,

only getting responses in Thai. I stood there, panting, trying to find

a thought, anything. As I came back to earth I needed to pee. The first

thing I did after surviving the tsunami was pee! Along limps an older

Thai guy, finds me, naked atop a dyke amid the destruction, covered in

mud and filth, pissing. He didn't even smile, nor did I.

I spent the next minutes running from high point to high point

screaming out for Karin. If I made it, she could too. There was no

response from her. I found plenty of other people, and helped who I

could, but always looking across this vast area of new lakes for her

head. Through the trees was a PT boat, a large steel police cruiser.

The boat and I had been brought more than a kilometer (2/3 mile)

inland.

I was standing near a tree, hoping for a clue, anything to say she was

out there somewhere. A small boy in a tree whimpered, and I pulled him

down. We went inland. There were houses, still standing, a whole

neighborhood atop a rise that was untouched. Just feet away were cars

wrapped around trees. I handed them the boy.

I had finished my medic training exactly one month before, so I went to

work. Pulling people out of mud, from under houses.

One car, upright against the trunk of a tree still had the driver. He

was dead. It went on. Before this I had only seen a dead body once or

twice. That was remedied very quickly.

I pulled people out of the water, only to have them choke and die right

there. I would take someone's pulse, scream for help, then find that

they had died before we could do anything. It was beyond any nightmare

or fear I have ever had.

An older Thai woman came up to me with a pair of shorts and averted

eyes. She was ashamed that I was totally naked. I smirked and slipped

them on. She smiled and scurried away.

Roaming the former streets looking for foreigners to send to the higher

ground, a place where we could all meet and tend to wounds.

After an hour the Thais came screaming out of the mud saying there was

another wave coming, and flying into the hills. We were left alone.

Those who could walk did, the rest were carried. We made a new base,

higher and safer. And the same thing happened again. And again.

Eventually we ended up in the jungle at a park, where there was water

and high ground. It was messy.

Eventually there were about 300 foreigners, about 120 of whom were

injured pretty severely with broken limbs and ribs, near-drownings.

Everyone had gashes of some kind, severed fingers or toes and shock

everywhere. There was no medicine, no tools, no scissors, no bandages.

Nothing but well water (of questionable cleanliness) and some sticks

and clothes. I tried to find anyone medically trained.

It was only the diving instructors who all had basic first aid. So we

cleaned with the water, we broke sticks and set bones and talked people

into a relatively calm place. If someone was severely cut, we used

their own clothing to mend the wounds. It was a horror story. The

floor was covered in blood, people were moaning or vomiting or asking

us to help them. And more arrived with every new wave of cars and

trucks fleeing the "next wave."

After hours of this, we got news of helicopters evacuating the injured.

So everyone rushed toward the trucks. I had to scream and push and pull

people out of the way. The ones who needed the evac the most were the

ones who couldn't get to the trucks.

After 20 minutes of sorting through the priorities, and feeling like we

had a handle on it, someone brought me to a girl who was bleeding

severely out of her thigh and was in shock. No one had brought her to

our little clinic area, they had left her in the back of the truck.

Finally, after a few helicopters had pulled out the worst, I headed

back down. Through rubber tree plantations and coconut groves we drove.

It seemed quiet and relaxed. At the last corner it was devastation. The

road was clear and dry up to a certain point and then it was a horizon

of rubble. I shuddered.

Someone on a scooter came up and asked for a doctor. Everyone looked at

me! I jumped on and they took me up roads I never knew existed, and

over bridges that were barely standing until I was brought to five

foreigners in the middle of nowhere.

One of them was a good friend and diving instructor. It was the first

person I had seen that I knew. It was a total joy. He was banged up

pretty bad, but he got out and sent off to the hospital. Then the Thais

came roaring up the hill, saying there was another wave. We had to

carry four more people with broken bones (including a broken hip) up a

hill. There was no wave. There never was.

I stumbled back down, wandering through the town looking for people to

help. I found only bodies. I found one with a tattoo like Karin's on a

scooter under some rubble. I pulled her out, and it was a Thai woman.

Still gripping her scooter, mouth agape.

Eventually I made my way back to the dive shop where I worked. We had

always whined about how it was too far off the main road, but it

survived. It was a center for the survivors. I walked up to find

friends alive and things clean and organized. I had been able to keep

on, doing what I could to help people, to close out my mind to what was

around me and look only at what I was doing, to not see the dead

people, to not worry about where Karin was. I had held together so

well.

When I found out Karin was alive,it all fell apart. I could smell the

destruction, the horror I had just walked through, just lived through,

that she had lived through. My body shouted out all the bruises and

cuts I had ignored. It all struck me and threw me to the ground. It was

too much. I could no longer accept this.

We hugged and ate and slept. My feet were cut up, I had small cuts all

over my body, and a sinus infection from all the bad water. Karin had

gotten hold of a coconut tree, wrapped herself around it and never let

go. She had a few bruises and small cuts and a black eye. I was

ecstatic to see her like that. Most of the rest of our friends had come

through. They had set up first aid stations and help stations,

organized food and created a center for people to meet. The diving

community came together and became our support, our medical care, our

food - they did everything they could to help and then some.

The next day I went back to where my house had been and surveyed the

damage. One bungalow nearby had been lifted up and dropped on top of

another. The whole beach was visible, meaning all of the two- or

three-story hotels that had lined it were gone. There was a jet ski

just near our house. The bottom floor of our house was gone, the upper

floor was missing a couple of walls. The only thing left was a plastic

Jesus doll I had bought as a joke. So I was left with nothing in the

world except my own plastic Jesus.

The level of destruction is virtually impossible to describe. On our

beach we had approximately 2,500 hotel rooms. It looked to me that

maybe 50 could still be called hotel rooms.

The week between Christmas and New Year's is the busiest of the week.

Without warning, without an evacuation plan, the survival rates were

minimal. The wave at our house was about 7 meters high (20 feet), and

in some places it was 10 meters (30 feet) high. It wiped out the third

floor of most resorts.

The number of dead is astronomical, several thousand on my beach alone.

By the second day you could smell it, and in the short walk to my

former house, we passed about 10 bodies just strewn about. Our final

glance of the town was a cattle truck stacked full of wrapped-up

corpses. We wanted to go home.

In Bangkok most people got help pretty quickly. The Swedes, Germans and

English had charted flights for their citizens to get home. The Thai

government gave free hotel rooms to survivors, and there were lists of

places to get food.

Except the Americans. I went in to find out what help I could get - I

was able to get a replacement passport, a toothbrush and a paperback

book. They said it was not their policy to arrange flights home. I was

cut up, still covered in a pretty good layer of mud, I had no home, no

money, no clothing, nothing at all, and they could do nothing to help.

They did offer to let me borrow money, but they would have to find

three people in America who would vouch for me, and that process should

take less than a week. In the meantime, I was destitute and rejected by

the embassy. Karin was with me (she's Swedish) and said that I could

still try and emigrate to Sweden. I was very tempted.

In these last days, watching politicians go on about helping and giving

aide, but they won't even take care of their own citizens?

I am very, very angry. All the other nations of the world were taking

care of their own citizens! Eventually I got a flight home with JAL

(that would be Japan Airlines). Not even an American company, but a

Japanese company helped me get home.

Before I left I spoke to the embassy twice on the phone, giving my name

so I would be listed as alive so my family would not worry. I went to

the embassy twice, once to get a passport to replace the one lost in

the tsunami, and they never listed me as alive or found. I flew out of

the country using said passport and was still not found.

I am now listed as injured (having been in the states three days

already). My family is now waiting to see how long it will take before

they are notified about my status. So am I.

It does raise a good question - if I am missing or dead, do I have to

pay taxes?

While spiteful about the embassy, I am grateful to be alive, and that

those I care about are still alive. I still look around and am in awe

at what just happened. I really feel like someone has slipped me some

roofies (street name for the date rape drug Rohypnol), and I woke up in

America.

)'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'(

This tale was written in January. Pearl did make his way back to

America, but there are still thousands and thousands of people

struggling to recover from this disaster.

The dive shop he worked with in Thailand has continued to serve the

local community's recovery efforts, and a fund has been set up to make

donations to their relief efforts. You can find out more at

http://www.diveaid.co.uk

Pearl himself does now have clothes on his back and friends to help him

get off his feet, but he lost a lot in this disaster, and if you know

him and would like to assist, a Paypal fund exists for him as well.

http://tinyurl.com/5xwae

Pearl also adds:

"My story is just one...there and 100,000’s more far worse off – I had

somewhere to fly to. Donations should be sent to good charities, ones

that truly help.

Doctors Without borders http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org

and the Thailand Red Cross

http://www.redcross.or.th/english/home/index.php4

were both there fast and helping out immensely. I can’t speak, or even

dream of what it must be like in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Breathe…"

Let us all be grateful for the breath that we are so lucky to have. Our

thanks to Pearl for sharing his story.

-AG

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URL: http://www.bmw2002faq.com/talkshop/test/

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