KHAO LAK, Thailand — Watana Sittirachot was raised at an orphanage in Thailand for children affected by the 2004 Asian tsunami. Now, 20 years after the disaster changed the course of his life, he’s running the place himself.
The Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami began with a powerful 9.3-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Aceh in northern Indonesia. Within hours, a series of waves that in some cases reached more than 100 feet tall had devastated coastal communities around the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 230,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and other countries.
It is considered the deadliest natural disaster this century and one of the deadliest in recorded history.
Sittirachot was 12 years old when the tsunami hit, living in the village of Ban Nam Khem, where his parents had left him to be raised by an aunt and uncle.
He said there was “not a single house left” in his village after the tsunami, which killed a quarter of the population of about 4,000.
“Everything was wiped out,” he said. “I only saw the empty ground.”
Wreckage left in the wake of the tsunami in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand, on Jan. 4, 2004.
His uncle died in the tsunami, and his aunt remarried a man who wanted Sittirachot to quit school and start working, which he did not want to do. A teacher found him a place at the Baan Than Namchai Foundation so he could continue his studies.
The orphanage was established with help from Australian and British volunteers for more than 30 children who lost parents to the tsunami.
“It is a place that has given me everything,” said Sittirachot, whose nickname is Game.
For the first two years after the tsunami, the children lived in a tent. The founding director, Rotjana Phraesrithong, later raised money at home and overseas for a proper building.
Sittirachot, who would have had few job prospects if he had quit school, thrived at the orphanage.
With Phraesrithong’s encouragement, he earned a bachelor’s degree in law, followed by an MBA during the pandemic. He is currently pursuing a degree in digital marketing.
Though the tsunami took so much away from him, “it gave me good things in life too,” Sittirachot said.
Sittirachot became director of the orphanage after Phraesrithong died from cancer in 2017.
A young Indonesian boy waits to buy gasoline near Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Dec. 30, 2004.
“Before she passed, I still remember vividly when she took the oxygen tube out and told me, ‘Game, please take care of the children, make this place a happy place,’” he said.
Remembrance and resilience
In some ways, it appears as if nothing ever happened in Khao Lak, a popular tourist spot in southern Thailand where most of the country’s more than 5,000 tsunami deaths occurred.
During a visit this month by NBC News, vacationers lounged on soft sand beaches and surfers bobbed in the water. Seaside bars were playing reggae and Christmas songs, and tourists could be heard speaking Russian, French, German and English.
But there are clues to past destruction. Beachfront hotels have been rebuilt on slightly higher ground, further protected by seawalls. Tsunami shelters dot the shoreline, set back from the beach, while alert towers are equipped with loudspeakers and signs mark evacuation routes — all parts of a warning system that did not exist in 2004.
One abandoned hotel that was destroyed in the tsunami appeared untouched in the past 20 years beyond the garbage strewn across the tiled floors and walls painted with graffiti, the jungle around it slowly taking over.
A former hotel in Khao Lak, Thailand, pictured Dec. 13, was abandoned after the devastating tsunami.
A Thai police boat that had been swept nearly a mile and a half inland remains in place as a memorial. On the day of the tsunami, it had been part of the security detail for the king’s daughter as she vacationed in the area with her family — her son was jet-skiing when the waves hit and carried him away.
At a cemetery for tsunami victims, about 200 volunteers turned out to clean it ahead of the anniversary, sweeping and burning branches that had fallen from palm trees. A fire truck hose was being used as a pressure washer to clean debris and mildew from a large stone fountain shaped like a wave.
The gravestones are numbered to reflect the burial system that was developed to properly inter hundreds of victims whose bodies were never claimed or identified.
Arunswasdi Bhuridadtpong was in her 20s and had recently finished school in Bangkok when the tsunami hit, and she came down south to volunteer. She ended up spending two months as the cemetery manager.
People place roses at Ban Nam Khem tsunami memorial wall in Thailand in 2014.
She and her team were tasked with burying bodies to preserve them, then digging them up to try to identify them and return them to families.
Despite the emotional intensity of her work, the humanity she witnessed made it in some ways “the best experience of my life, ever,” said Bhuridadtpong, who is now pursuing a doctorate in community-based disaster risk management at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.
Even after experiencing unimaginable personal tragedies, Bhuridadtpong said, human beings instinctively seem to know not only how to bounce back, “but how to bounce back better.”
At the orphanage, the focus has shifted from children who were orphaned by the tsunami to those whose parents are unable to care for them due to poverty or imprisonment.
There are 93 children and young adults in its care, including 15 who are in college. The youngest is about 18 months old.
A grandmother and a child outside their collapsed house in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Jan. 5, 2005.
During a recent visit by NBC News, about a dozen high school-age children were practicing singing Christmas carols in English while a stray dog — who also considers the orphanage his home — wandered among them.
When the children get home from school, they do homework or play sports, and there’s a playground for the younger children. There is also an organic garden, chickens and a fish pond, and every child has assigned tasks such as feeding the animals or tending to the greenhouse.
Every Dec. 26, Sittirachot takes the children to clean a mass grave for tsunami victims.
“I always tell the children that if the tsunami didn’t happen, we would not have Baan Than Namchai,” he said. “We wouldn’t have this home for everyone to stay together like this.”
Janis Mackey Frayer and Nat Sumon reported from Khao Lak and Jennifer Jett from Hong Kong.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com