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Additional Text for the 01/01/05 Alumni Sandstorm 
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>>From: Bonnie Steeber Frasca ('57)

Re: Tsunami

Maren, I received the attached email from my oldest daughter, Laura,
who lives in a northern suburb of Bangkok, Thailand. I found 
it a sad but interesting first hand report from a survivor. I'm
forwarding it to you and leaving it up to you whether or not it can
be attached to the Sandstorm. It is long and if it can be included,
fine, if not, that's okay.

Bonnie Steeber Frasca ('57) raining in Tucson, but we love it!
__________________________

Laura writes:

Below is a forwarded note I received from a friend of a friend. 
This person is a teacher at an International school in The Hague,
Netherlands who was vacationing in Thailand. Her story is incredible
and typical of what I have heard from other survivors.
____________________

(Forwarded Letter)
We decided to return this Christmas to Kho Lak, 90 minutes from
Phuket, in Thailand, because we had a wonderful time there last
year. We had spent 5 days on a diving live-aboard around the Similan
Islands. This time we planned on diving from Khao Lak but for some
reason kept postponing it. We never missed an opportunity before.
Khoa Lak has a beautiful 10 km beach. Between the beach and the road
(about 200 meter) lies a string of resort hotels, mostly wooden
bungalows that are nicely situated in lush vegetation. The first 2
hotels, one of them ours, are situated on a slope, because the road
descends from some higher ground to beach level. We were woken up at
8 a.m. because our bungalow was trembling. We cursed those
construction workers for starting so early, without consideration
for us jet-lagging tourists. We fell asleep again, and woke up again
at 10. We decided to make a run to breakfast, which was served until
10.30. The restaurant was outside on a terrace, overlooking the pool
and beyond that the beach and the Andeman Sea. After we sat down,
Tom noticed that the waiters were all staring and pointing at the
sea. He stood up to see what they were looking at, and saw that the
seawater was receding rapidly. It was a fascinating sight, and many
people got their cameras out and walked toward the dry seabed and
onto it. They started looking for shells and other things, were
jogging out there and throwing balls etc. The beach itself was full
of sunbathing tourists. He had an uncomfortable feeling about all
this. He lived 2 years on the beach in California, and had never
seen a sea behave like this, so far outside the parameters of tidal
fluctuations. Then all of a sudden the penny dropped. The earlier
trembling was an earthquake. The receding water (300 meter, all the
way to the reef by now) was the prelude to a tidal wave.

Tom grabbed my hand and screamed "run!" I was reluctant because the
waiter just brought us a specially prepared vegetarian Thai Curry
and I did not want to hurt his feelings. At that same moment Tom saw
a 10 meter high wall of water come crashing over the reef towards us
at a speed of 40-50 mph. The sound was bloodcurdling. 30 seconds
later and we might not be writing this story. We ran uphill, fast,
and the water was right behind us. I ran out of breath and energy
and felt almost nauseous. The noise was deafening, like airplanes in
your ear.

We ran to the road that went uphill to the hotel lobby, which was
located near the higher road. We were followed by about 10 other
restaurant guests. Halfway up the hill Tom dared to look behind and
saw below us at the beach and the pool area a boiling mass of water,
where only a minute before had been sunbathing tourists. In it were
palm trees, beach chairs and parts of bungalows twirling around, as
well as people that were franticly trying to hold on to something.
Since I am a slow runner, I had to choose between running or
turning. There was no extra split second to do both. We kept running
till we reached the deck at the reception, from were we had a good
view of this inferno. We saw that another wave was coming in, and
decided to keep going for higher ground. We crossed the road and
started to climb the steep hill into the jungle beyond it, not
feeling safe until we gained another 50 meter in altitude. There we
waited out the onslaught for two hours, knowing that only few people
would have survived the onslaught down there.

When the sea looked calm again we descended to the hotel reception
at the road, and found a score of severely wounded people. We helped
to get them onto the back of pick-up trucks that would drive them to
the hospital, not knowing however if the road was OK. Then we were
warned of another tsunami on the way, so we climbed up into the
jungle again, with two German women and an 8 year old Austrian girl.
She was too young to remember the name of her village. Her father
could not join us. He had swallowed so much water that after 2 steps
he was exhausted, so him too we sent to the hospital. Her mother was
missing. We waited 2 more hours up there, and saw the wave come and
recede. It was not as big as the morning ones.

We then came down to the road where cars and flatbed trucks loaded
with wounded were driving by non-stop. No one knew what to do, where
to go, if another wave or earthquake would come, where the safest
place was. We did not know if the airport at Phuket was washed away
or not, if the roads to the hospital were still reachable.

We did not want to go down to the lower level and see all the
corpses that littered the beach. Lucky for us that our room was high
enough to have been spared, so we went to get our luggage and were
driven that evening to a police post, located on the highest part of
the road. There was no electricity, no cell-phone network nor radio,
so we spent the night at a small restaurant stand, where Id, the
Thai woman who ran it, took great care of the 50 or so stranded
tourist who spent the night there. She fed us and gave us water, and
put down mats and towels to sleep on. We were the luckiest people
there. Most people were missing friends or family members and had no
possessions other than the beach clothes they were wearing. The
woman in the restaurant, which belonged to her aunt, told us a wry
story. She owned a fruit stall on the beach and received a phone
call from her uncle, a police officer on Phuket Island, that a
tsunami was coming. She ran to the beach to warn people, but they
shrugged her off. Then she called the hotels, and they too refused
to believe her. She climbed the stairs up to the road and safety,
but lost her whole business in the waves.

The next day the road was clear, and we could start the long trip
back home (The Hague, Holland). We met many people on the way back,
and heard mostly very sad stories of decimated families and lost
friends. The Thai people without exception were wonderful. Despite
their own sorrow and losses they did all they could to help us. We
are deeply moved by their attitude, and will go back to Thailand
soon. We found out that the little Austrian girl's mother had also
survived, when we called her grandmother in Austria.


We are the only husband and wife couple we met there who are
complete. We have each other, not one scratch, even have our
luggage. We were with hundreds and hundreds of people, and have not
met one other person with our luck. Everyone was wounded or dead or
missing someone or missing many. One night we were drinking pina
coladas and beer with people around the pool bar, the next day we
were whispering words of love in their ears as we washed their
wounds and put them in makeshift trucks, direction hospital. Blood
everywhere.


We met so many suffering people. All night, all day, they exchanged
stories, horror stories of getting hit by a floating car, of the TVs
and refrigerators swirling in the water, missing loved ones,
watching your wife smack into a tree, holding on to the ceiling of
your room, getting washed out through windows. One snorkeler was in
a speedboat, followed by the wave right behind him for 20 minutes!
When they arrived back, the captain knew to find a waterway he could
follow and get the 10 passengers closer on land. When the captain
dropped them off, he returned to find his brother on sea and that's
when he was swallowed. We heard of 2 people who quickly ran to their
rooms to get documents and were not heard from again. One man was
the sole survivor of his family: his wife, daughter, son in law, and
grandchildren were dead. One friend had to turn over many dead
bodies as he searched for his missing friend. He was in shock. He
and his friend's wife had split up and searched 6 hospitals but no
luck. One friend we spent 60 hrs with had felt a pulse of a woman
with a mouth full of broken teeth. He was giving her mouth to mouth
resuscitation when he realized that she was dead - he had been
feeling his own pulse.

One in particular stands out in my heart. His name is Anders and he
was there with his 16 year old daughter and wife and daughter's
friend. He had his own hotel in Sweden, by a lake, but it was low
season so he was in Khao Lak too. He was on the beach with his
daughter but when the wave hit, they were separated. He found her in
a hospital, 6 hours later. She was wounded but perhaps worse than
that was the trauma she suffered from being surrounded by dead
bodies in the water. His wife and daughter's friend were still
missing. Anders and his daughter slept right besides us on the
cement floor that night. We shared cigars, drinks, clothes, since we
had all our luggage and no one else did. There were many tearful
hugs. We exchanged addresses and I will contact him soon. I pray
that he found his family.

There was another Swedish man that was dancing at the bar, clowning
around at night, while Tom and I were swimming in the pool watching
him. We had drinks with him, but he did not speak much English, so
we mostly grunted. He was with friends and wife, a big strong man.
When we came down from the mountain, he was alone, bleeding, cut
everywhere. His arm looked like an intestine, insides hanging out.
We poured water on his wounds, just trying to get the sand out and
disinfect, then loaded him into a truck to go to the hospital. You
would not believe the pain he was in. He was doubled over, wounded
on every part of his body. It took forever to get him a truck, he
suffered so long. I pray that he made it too. When we sent people to
the hospital, it was full of guilt, not knowing if the roads there
were closed, since the poles had fallen over, not knowing if the
roads were washed away, not knowing if they'd have to wait for hours
in the hallways, not knowing if the ride would be too bumpy, or if
the hospital was near the water. It felt that we could be sending
them to their death. I will never forget Harry, an Australian man
lying next to us, crying out in his sleep when he turned over. Both
his knees had hit a car has he saw his wife smash into a tree,
devastated that he could not hold onto her. He held the car window
until the water receded and the car sank in the muddy sand. All he
had was his bathing suit - and he walked away early in the morning,
barefoot, to begin searching the hospitals.

I had access to an e-mail when we spent 20 hrs in Bangkok. We
watched a lot of BBC and wanted to tell the world how very kind the
Thai people had been, thinking of the tourists, when they were
victims themselves. I wrote a few sentences on-line. When we got
home, three different BBC stations reacted and called us for
interviews. We were also on the 8:30 Thai Nation news, for about 30
minutes, and the Thai and Dutch newspaper and Dutch TV. We kept
repeating over and over how amazing the Thai people were and how we
were planning on returning to Thailand as soon as possible. It was
important to tell that.

Last night the doorbell rang and it was a neighbor who had seen us
on Dutch TV. She was on her way to posting a $500 check to a help
organization. She decided to give it to us instead to send to
Thailand. We are sending it to Id who lost her restaurant yet fed
not only 50 tourists but a few hundred soldiers and police who kept
passing through all night and day. Such generosity was typical of
everywhere we went. She was serving us rather than looking for her
own missing uncle. She is an angel, working all day and all night
and all day again, to make sure that everyone was ok. She gave us
coffee, water, blankets, towels, mats, care and love and made sure
we were all ok. She came up to all of us, repeating "have more, did
you have enough? do you want more?" She served special vegetarian
dinner for Tom and me. We will visit her when we come back to
Thailand. A man gave 10 of us a 2-hour ride in his pick up truck to
a bus station. He refused money. A woman sat beside him, and it was
only when I kept insisting that we needed to find a train station
that she told me she needed to get back to look for her sister. This
woman rode 2 hours each way, just so that she could point out the
right bus to us, when she could have been using that precious time
to find her sister. Such are the Thai folk.


We spent Sunday night on the cement floor of Id's family's outdoor
snack bar, the next day waiting 8 hours for the bus, that night on
an 11 hr bus ride to Bangkok, the next day waited 19 hours in
Bangkok for the plane, that night 11 hrs on the plane, and now we're
home. I wanted nothing more than to get back, but the second we l
landed in Amsterdam, I wanted to return to Thailand to help out in
the hospitals. I would have flown back the same day, but Tom's back
hurt from the long hours of travel. Now I feel less guilty as the
Thai govt is asking for volunteers to stop coming. It's hard for
them to take care of travelers.

Last note: I just read about how the animals escaped, even the
elephants, and I remember the beach dog who ran up the mountain
ahead of us...

We miss Thailand and can't wait to go back. Ugo says the Thai people
are and were all fantastic and if there is anything that anybody
should be told in the West it should be: go to Thailand for your
next holiday or whenever you can any time in the future: that is the
best help for the people here to get back to their life, to their
daily routine , to their income.

Last last note: We called our friends tonight, December 31. The
Swedish man is reunited with his wife and daughter's friend. What
happened is that when he checked into a hospital in Phuket, his wife
checked into the same hospital 5 minutes before him. She was right
outside his hospital room, by hazard. The mother and father of the 8
year old girl from Austria are fine and flying back to Austria
tomorrow. She is at her grandma's house now. More people have
contacted us to give us money for Id to spread around in Khao Lak -
over 1300 euros as of tonight. We are waiting to contact Id and then
we will send it.

Tonight, we spoke to the German woman we spent 60 hours with and I
was relieved to here about the guilt she carried. Relieved because I
thought I was the only one. I will never forgive myself for not
going to the hospital with the wounded, with sending them off
instead, with not sharing more with everyone - maybe mainly for
coming back unscratched. The guilt is hard to bear. It penetrates
every pore every second. And the not being able to cry. Otherwise,
it's still dreamlike and I don't feel affected, and that makes me
feel hard. Just sipping champagne and watching friends light
firecrackers on new year's eve, while the bloated bodies are still
floating is too selfish for words. If I am ever in an emergency
situation again, I know I will react in a way which will not leave
me feeling such shame.

We are happy to be alive, and at the same time weep for all those
people who were not so fortunate.
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-Bonnie Steeber Frasca ('57)
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