Thousands mark tsunami anniversary

[Forkboy]

PHUKET, Thailand - Buddhist monks in orange robes chanted on a Thai beach, an Indonesian mother mourned her children at a mass grave, and a man scattered flowers in now-placid waters yesterday to commemorate the 230,000 killed five years ago when a tsunami ripped across Asia.

An outpouring of aid that followed the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami has helped replace homes, schools and entire coastal communities decimated by the disaster. But at ceremonies yesterday, survivors spoke of the enduring wounds.

Thousands in Indonesia’s Aceh province, which was hardest hit, held prayer services at mosques and beside the mass graves where tens of thousands were buried. The 167,000 people who died in Indonesia accounted for more than half the total death toll.

Among them were the relatives of Siti Amridar, a 48-year-old woman who wept yesterday at a mass grave in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. She was a mother of five, until the tsunami claimed four of her children, her parents and washed away their village.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2009/12/27/thousands_mark_tsunami_anniversary/

[uppityperson]

1. k&r. 5 years? whew

[aquart]

2. When I went to sleep they said a hundred dead.

And the next morning woke late, greeting my family with "How many?" They hadn't turned on the news, they didn't know what I knew when I went to bed. So I turned on the TV and told them.

[Forkboy]

3. My mind still struggles with the number.

I remember the initial reports saying a hundred, then hundreds, then thousands. By the time it became hundreds of thousands my mind was shutting down out of self defense.

I have a DVD called Sumatran Folk Cinema that's all about music from that area, and most of it was filmed a year earlier in the Banda Aceh region. There's a sequence filmed on the docks and it's very unsettling watching that part and knowing the entire area was literally erased and that many of the people I'm seeing in the video are dead now. The music on the DVD is so varied and awesome, but there's always this shadow over it now that you can't escape when watching it.

[Electric Monk]

4. Hundreds of thousands? Somehow I missed that, I thought it was (only) tens of thousands.

What a tragic day. We should declare a war on water and earthquakes, or something.

[aquart]

5. "U.S. Geological Survey puts tsunami death toll at 275,950"

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6948775/>