Indonesia<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\nIt is considered the deadliest natural disaster this century and one of the deadliest in recorded history.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He said there was \u201cnot a single house left\u201d in his village after the tsunami, which killed a quarter of the population of about 4,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything was wiped out,\u201d he said. \u201cI only saw the empty ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\nWreckage left in the wake of the tsunami in Ban Nam Khem, Thailand, on Jan. 4, 2004.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The orphanage was established with help from Australian and British volunteers for more than 30 children who lost parents to the tsunami.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a place that has given me everything,\u201d said Sittirachot, whose nickname is Game.<\/p>\n
For the first two years after the tsunami, the children lived in a tent. The founding director, Rotjana\u00a0Phraesrithong, later raised money at home and overseas for a proper building.<\/p>\n
Sittirachot, who would have had few job prospects if he had quit school, thrived at the orphanage.<\/p>\n
With Phraesrithong\u2019s encouragement, he earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in law, followed by an MBA during the pandemic. He is currently pursuing a degree in digital marketing.<\/p>\n
Though the tsunami took so much away from him, \u201cit gave me good things in life too,\u201d Sittirachot said.<\/p>\n
Sittirachot became director of the orphanage after Phraesrithong\u00a0 died from cancer in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\nA young Indonesian boy waits to buy gasoline near Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Dec. 30, 2004.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u201cBefore she passed, I still remember vividly when she took the oxygen tube out and told me, \u2018Game, please take care of the children, make this place a happy place,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Remembrance and resilience<\/h2>\n 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\u2019s more than 5,000 tsunami deaths occurred.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 all parts of a warning system that did not exist in 2004.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\nA former hotel in Khao Lak, Thailand, pictured Dec. 13, was abandoned after the devastating tsunami.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\u2019s daughter as she vacationed in the area with her family \u2014 her son was jet-skiing when the waves hit and carried him away.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\nPeople place roses at Ban Nam Khem tsunami memorial wall in Thailand in 2014.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Despite the emotional intensity of her work, the humanity she witnessed made it in some ways \u201cthe best experience of my life, ever,\u201d said Bhuridadtpong, who is now pursuing a doctorate in community-based disaster risk management at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.<\/p>\n
Even after experiencing unimaginable personal tragedies, Bhuridadtpong said, human beings instinctively seem to know not only how to bounce back, \u201cbut how to bounce back better.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
There are 93 children and young adults in its care, including 15 who are in college. The youngest is about 18 months old.<\/p>\n\n\nA grandmother and a child outside their collapsed house in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Jan. 5, 2005.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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 \u2014 who also considers the orphanage his home \u2014 wandered among them.<\/p>\n
When the children get home from school, they do homework or play sports, and there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Every Dec. 26, Sittirachot takes the children to clean a mass grave for tsunami victims.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always tell the children that if the tsunami didn\u2019t happen, we would not have Baan Than Namchai,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have this home for everyone to stay together like this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Janis Mackey Frayer and Nat Sumon reported from Khao Lak and Jennifer Jett from Hong Kong.<\/em><\/p>\nThis article was originally published on NBCNews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KHAO LAK, Thailand — Watana Sittirachot was raised at an orphanage in Thailand for children affected by the 2004 Asian tsunami. Now,Read More ›<\/a><\/button><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}