After Tsunami, Volunteers Rushing In

Four months after the tsunami struck, Andy Chaggar gave up his engineering job in Britain and returned to Thailand to help rebuild houses near where his girlfriend was swept to her death.

“It seemed irrelevant to go back to my old job and work for a profit-making company,” said Chaggar. Now he manages a housing project for about 180 Thais in the village of Thap Tawan, in the Khao Lak resort area 360 miles south of Bangkok.

The killer waves that struck last year on Dec. 26 killed at least 5,400 people in Thailand. In all, about 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.

Much of the international media coverage focused on Thailand, where more than 2,500 vacationing foreigners were killed. And since the disaster, thousands of people from around the world have used vacation time or interrupted careers to help.

There’s Scott Carter of Georgetown, N.C., making fishing boats, and Joa Keis, from Corvallis, Ore., teaching English. Dive enthusiasts are scouring the seabed for debris. Other volunteers comb the beaches. The visitors make everything from playgrounds with brightly colored swings to furniture for rebuilt homes.

The Tsunami Volunteer Center says it has found work for more than 3,500 volunteers who range in age from 19 to 67 from such countries as Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany and the United States -- 51 countries in all since the center opened in January.

Sombat Boonngamanong, the program’s Thai founder, marvels at the sight of Christians, Buddhists and Muslims working together to rebuild homes.

“I see the universality and open-mindedness, which goes beyond religions and races,” he says.

“At Thap Tawan, when the volunteers finish building a house, you will see their photographs pinned on the wall. Villagers still talk about this and that volunteer,” Sombat said.

He fondly remembers a spirited woman in her 40s with one leg named Elle, helping to rebuild houses.

“When we saw her working, we felt that we couldn’t do less than what she did,” he says.

At the Phi Phi Dive Camp on the island of Phi Phi, they call it “voluntourism” -- a program in which about 4,000 volunteers have helped to remove 290 tons of debris from the sea and the beach.

Some stay a day, others have been here for eight months. Some are here for the first time; others, like Chaggar, were here when the wave struck.

The British couple from Leicester were on the seventh week of a round-the-world trip when the tsunami pounded their bungalow on the beach at Khao Lak. Chaggar survived with a broken collarbone and badly injured legs. His partner, whom he prefers not to name, was washed away. Her body was identified six months later.

The young engineer returned to Britain and struggled to cope with the absence of someone who had been part of his life for six years. In April he returned, and was recently with six other foreigners mixing concrete under a glaring sun.

The work has helped him to cope with his loss.

Thousands of fishing boats were destroyed, leaving many villagers without a livelihood. So Scott Carter closed his small engineering firm in North Carolina and moved here in March. He and other volunteers work with fishermen to build a boat every three weeks, at a cost of about $3,250 each. Using donations from Americans and others, they have made 36 boats and aim to build 47 in all before turning the enterprise into a commercial endeavor run by Thais.

A self-taught boat maker, Carter said he didn’t get paid. Payday, he says, is seeing a new boat launched.

“The last boat that I build will be mine,” Carter says -- a 62-footer which he plans to sail back to the United States next year.

Keis, from Oregon, has been teaching English to schoolchildren for most of the year to prepare them for jobs in a revived tourism industry. He and 12 others teach 16 hours a week.

“You can have your whole life making money,” said Keis, 25. “But a lot of people would pay a lot of money for my experiences.”