INDEPTH: DISASTER IN ASIA
The lucky ones
CBC News Online | January 20, 2005
From The National, January 19, 2005
Reporter: Terry Milewski
Recovery will come slower for some of the areas hit by this disaster, where the people felt the earthquake's full force, the tsunami's full weight.
One area is India's Andaman and Nicobar islands. They're an anthropologist's dream. Some are untouched. Others are home to primitive tribes. India rarely lets outsiders see for themselves. How did they fare?
The children who ran fast enough or held on tight enough were the lucky ones when the tsunami smashed their villages three weeks ago.
They are Nicobarese, in appearance more Indonesian than South Indian, flown by the Indian air force to a bigger, safer island after their own island, Car Nicobar, was devastated.
Now young and old are stuck in relief camps barely able to talk about what they went through.
Henry Amos, the pastor in a village on Car Nicobar says the whole village is gone.
"Nothing. There is nothing," he says. "In my village, about 500 people missing." The missing include two of his children and most of his neighbours. Before the tsunami, 800 people lived in Car Nicobar.
The Andaman and Nicobar islands are Indian territory but much closer to the island of Sumatra than India, far out in the Indian Ocean. Like the nearby Indonesian islands, they are the peaks of an underwater mountain range formed by the clash of the Indian and Eurasian plates.
Car Nicobar lies very close to the epicentre of the great earthquake and it looks like it. Almost nothing was left standing when the tsunami hit.
Moses Reuben, a coconut farmer, heard the wave coming. "We heard the sound. Kind of sound like a jet engine, like that," he says. "Yeah, exploding up on us. I cannot say how much, could be more than, higher than this tree."
The fact that these islands lie directly on the fault line that caused the great earthquake of Dec. 26 means that the impact was something almost apocalyptic. People describe the earth opening up beneath their feet, the sea boiling up from the cracks, and whole villages erased from the map.
In Port Blair, which is the capital of these islands, people say the land literally shifted, that the earth has dropped about a metre.
The sea is reclaiming a section of the coastal road.
Further to the south, it is said that two or three smaller islands have disappeared, sunk beneath the waves.
Many of these people were found half starved in the jungle. To hear the survivors' stories, you really wonder how they made it.
"For four days they were hungry in the jungle, didn't eat or drink anything. Saying there's nothing. There was nothing even for them to take. They took nothing with them. Everything's destroyed in the village."
Elsie Reuben and her father Moses outran the wave, but half of their family did not.
Elsie Reuben
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"Everything has gone," Elsie Reuben says, "So sad, sir. Yeah. Brother also is gone. Two children. That's my elder sister's son. They are gone along with brother and grandfather."
She was in her kitchen when the earth opened up beneath her.
"When I came out, it was cracks, water also coming from the ground," Elsie says.
Her father was in the church.
"And the wall of the church also started to fall upon me, and I started to run from that and called them to come follow me too, going to the interior of the island, in the jungle," Moses Reuben says.
Elsie Reuben goes on. "So I carry the babies. I didn't stop. Just run, run, run. I don't know from where I run and up to where, I don't know that."
Moses Reuben
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"We are not expect this like this because we never heard this and we never seen – even our ancestors, grandpapa also never seen these things," Moses says.
"I really panicked to proceed back there," Elsie says. She says she is afraid to go back.
Teacher Jochi Bedvincent, described the wretched state of the few Nicobarese who stayed behind.
"We cried also, and after that, after two, three days, our tears dried up. What can we do more than that?" she says. "It's difficult for them, no drinking water. Water have been mixed up with lots of people because lots of corpse are still lying. Those who have decayed, they are burned in that particular place."
She says a neighbouring island was split in three parts and others disappeared.
"I heard that the Brother and Sister Islands here nearby, they have also vanished, and other small islands that are not known to us, they are not inhabitable, they are also gone down," Bedvincent says.
Now, human existence on these islands seems tenuous.
The waves seem to crash a little higher, picking away at the shoreline. The high tide washes out roads and bridges, forcing islanders to wade through the floods, and aftershocks have been strong and frequent here.
Even the wall of the old British colonial prison, which stood for 100 years, has finally crumbled.
There is also one intriguing mystery about what has happened on these islands, namely what exactly is the fate of the many small indigenous tribes who live in the jungles and have little or no contact with outsiders. Many of these are primitive hunter/gatherer societies, and the Indian government won't allow us to enter their reserves.
A man aims his bow and arrow at an Indian Coast Guard helicopter as it flies over their island in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago on Dec. 28, 2004. From circumstantial evidence, officials say fate and the ancient knowledge of secret signals in the wind and sea combined to save the five indigenous tribes living for centuries in the southern archipelago. (AP Photo/Indian Coast Guard
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Some of these tribes, in fact, are known for driving strangers away with bow and arrow. So little is known about how they weathered the tsunami. We have a few clues. An Indian coast guard pilot took this snapshot of a tribesman with a huge bow trying to shoot down a helicopter. That was taken as a sign that the tribe is okay.
As for the Nicobarese, they have long been a part of Indian society, but now they are a smaller part. Fully 17 per cent of their people are dead. Another 25 per cent are homeless. Most of the survivors say they will return and restart their lives on the fault line, but when and how, no one seems to know.
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