The last time Saran Sae-eaw saw his family alive, his father was struggling to rescue him, his mother and his siblings from the tsunami that devastated their village nearly two years ago.
Saran was the only one his father was able to save.
Both the 12-year-old’s parents and his three sisters all perished in the wall of water that killed 5 400 in Thailand and about 220 000 around the Indian Ocean on December 26 2004.
But while many Thai tsunami orphans found themselves victims of abuse, neglect and exploitation, Saran was welcomed into his extended family, who helped him deal with the memories of the day his family was swept away.
”I was at home in Ban Nam Khem village using the internet. The whole family was there,” he says in a whisper.
”My father went to the fishing pier, and he ran home and told me to get away. ‘We have to escape now,’ he said, and he went back to help my mother and sisters,” Saran says, arms hugged tight around his body.
Saran ran, but was caught up in the deadly wave and knocked unconscious by debris in the water. He remembers waking up in hospital, confused and alone, and found out a week later that the tsunami had killed his whole family.
”It is stuck in my heart,” he says. ”I’m still afraid, even when there is an earthquake in Sumatra.”
Like most of the 1 459 Thai children who lost one or both parents in the tsunami, Saran was enveloped into his extended family, which acts as Thailand’s traditional safety net.
”The orphan children, they lost their parents, but they have not totally lost the elders in their family,” says Surapong Thumborisuth, communications officer with NGO World Vision.
But while Saran found sanctuary and stability with his aunt and uncle, others have not been so fortunate.
Alexander Krueger, tsunami child-protection officer with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), says that many orphans fell through the cracks in Thailand’s less-than-perfect child protection system.
”After the tsunami, what they thought about in terms of child-protection issues was providing financial support and scholarships for orphans,” he says.
”The issue was not verifying that children were properly taken care of by their families or extended families.”
Krueger thinks that immediately after the tsunami, the emphasis was put on trauma counselling rather than addressing the children’s basic needs.
”They go to school and they get all these nice programmes to recover from the trauma, but then they go back to a family that beats them. That does not help” he says.
He has seen cases of sexual abuse and children forced into work, and says that after any disaster, there is an increase in domestic abuse and alcoholism.
And with money flowing into the region from the Thai government, aid agencies and private businesses, opportunism is rife.
”Some families simply accepted to take care of the child because of the financial support,” he says.
Most orphans received 15 000 baht ($425) from the Thai government, and many receive funds from elsewhere. Saran receives 1 000 baht a month from a foreign businesswoman.
”Why would you give a financial incentive just because you lost a parent?” asks Krueger.
”Most of the money, since there were no guidelines or control, it has been used by the hosting family, so they bought motorcycles or mobile phones,” he adds.
The money that flowed into Ban Nam Khem is visible everywhere. The local school is plastered with logos of the businesses and organisations that paid for it, ranging from French retail giant Carrefor to an elementary school in Minnesota, United States.
”The children are doing much better now. At the school a lot of money has come in,” says Robert Johnson, a teacher who travelled to Ban Nam Khem with an international Christian organisation.
He agrees that the money from the government has not always been a blessing, with some of the youngsters getting involved in crime, but says that most children have been surprisingly resilient considering the devastation.
”This village lost about 80% of its housing. It was really ground zero,” he says.
Unicef, with the backing of the Thai government, is now conducting a survey to try and update the number of orphans and find out what happened to them all.
”Some of the children have never been monitored,” says Krueger, adding that his main fear is that some of them will never be found. — AFP
