Rice Visits a Thai Village Where the Tsunami’s Scars Run Deep

Eleven-year-old Plai was watching television when the giant wave came, washing away his father and nine other relatives.

On Monday, Plai sat looking blank as his classmates sang the ABC song, with a beaming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conducting with one finger. Rice, on a tour of tsunami reconstruction efforts in southern Thailand, was visiting a new boarding school being built for tsunami orphans and other needy children.

Asked what he thought of the smiling American visitor, Plai said his mind was not on Rice.

“I was thinking about my father,” he said.

Recovery has been uneven since the Dec. 26 tsunami, which killed at least 5,400 people in Thailand. Many areas Rice toured on an overnight visit to the island of Phuket, the jewel of Thailand’s beach resorts, were untouched by the wave. Others have been rebuilt with such astonishing speed that few signs of the disaster were apparent Monday.

But the damage to the lives of survivors like Plai, whose formal name is Nittitum Panaiem, is proving more difficult to repair.

More than 225,000 people in eight countries are dead or missing from the tsunami, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. More than 173,000 people were displaced.

Though as many as 128,000 people in Indonesia may have died, international media coverage was heavily focused on Thailand, where more than 2,500 vacationing foreigners were killed.

The terrifying images of the disaster have scared away the tourists.

Seven months later, at least one luxurious Phuket resort unscathed by the tsunami was only 20% occupied Monday, despite steep discounts. The Asian tourists who provide most of the summer business aren’t coming. Some of the more superstitious don’t want to stay in rooms where guests might have died, say residents and media reports.

The bookings for winter, which should already be rolling in from Europe and elsewhere, have not yet materialized.

According to Thailand’s Tourism Ministry, the number of visitors to Phuket over the last three months was down 50% compared with last year.

The ministry forecasts that bookings for the upcoming peak winter season will be off 35% to 40%.

Tourism accounts for 6.4% of Thailand’s gross domestic product. Some in the industry have complained that for them, the tsunami aftermath has been worse than the wave itself.

The United States has committed $350 million to humanitarian relief and reconstruction for affected nations, of which $132 million is in the process of being spent, according to USAID.

Rice toured a project being funded entirely by private charity, however. She traveled by helicopter and drove through rubber plantations and coconut groves about 40 miles north of Phuket city to the remote coastal village of Ban Bang Sak, where the tsunami killed 1,500 people and obliterated the school. Only its flagpole was left standing.

Residents showed photographs of the aftermath, which included miles of wreckage, dozens of blackened bodies on the beach, boats tossed up into the streets.

Where the school had been, “there were desks sitting up in the trees” two weeks afterward, said Barbara Franklin, PTA president of International School Bangkok, which raised $800,000 to help build a new school in Ban Bang Sak.

The school’s eight dormitories, built with help from other private groups, will house 300 children orphaned by the tsunami and 700 other impoverished pupils. One of the dorms is named after Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s American-born grandson, Poomi Jensen, 21, who died in the tsunami while jet-skiing off the nearby resort area of Khao Lak.

“We are here celebrating the enormous spirit of the survivors,” Rice said after touring the construction site and meeting some of the students, teachers and staffers.

“I’m here in Thailand to show how much the Untied States cares about Southeast Asia,” she said.

Several teachers said they thought Rice’s visit would do much to boost morale at the school, where a number of children are showing signs of depression.

“Me too,” said teacher Jan Roekwises, 34, who during the tsunami was trapped in her car by water that rose to her neck. In the weeks afterward, she said, she spent most of her time sleeping, dreaming of playing with her three dogs, which drowned.

Roekwises consulted a psychiatrist in Bangkok, who advised her to keep busy. So she volunteered at the school, which has a shortage of teachers. One of her pupils is Plai. Before the disaster, she had tutored the happy boy in English and computers.

Plai’s father, a fruit vendor, disappeared into the wave, as did two siblings. His mother, who owned a beachside restaurant and was on higher ground shopping for food, survived, Roekwises said.

“She is very sad,” she said. “She’s depressed.”

The school is being built on higher ground, but villas, resorts and shacks are sprouting in their old beachside locations, and residents are trickling back, Roekwises said.

Thai officials repeatedly thanked Rice and the United States for its reconstruction help. But according to media reports, many Southeast Asian leaders were offended by Rice’s decision not to attend ASEAN, the annual regional summit scheduled for this month, which has been attended by U.S. secretaries of State for more than a decade.

Journalists peppered Rice with questions Monday about her decision to skip the event, and Thai officials reportedly pressed her to change her mind.

Rice, who plans to visit Africa instead, said she regretted that “essential travel” would prevent her from coming. She will be represented by Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, an expert in Southeast Asian affairs who knows many of the region’s leaders.