The following are snapshots of how people coped Tuesday in the aftermath of the devastating powerful earthquake and tsunamis.
‘We wanted to help’
When a man who gave his name as Prabhu and his friends showed up in a three-wheel delivery motorcycle piled with used clothes Tuesday in Muttukadu, India, they were mobbed by people left homeless by the tsunamis.
As the situation verged on chaos, local officials of this small fishing village stepped in and shepherded Prabhu across the street, where his 10 bags of clothing were put with food that was being rationed.
More than 300 people were sheltering under three huge banyan trees. Most lost everything when waves swept over their thatch homes.
“Mostly these people lost clothes. … We wanted to help,” said Prabhu, a 26-year-old laborer who is going around with his friends to gather clothes from their neighbors.
Inconsolable loss
To save his only son, Vijay Kumar hugged the boy as hard as he could. He refused to let the first wave take 3-year-old Rajaraman when it lifted the pair to the height of a two-story building and whirled them around.
But then the tsunami dropped them as quickly as it had snatched them and something hit Kumar hard in the back. The force of the blow threw open his arms. The water pulled Rajaraman away and down into a roiling torrent, and all his father could do was watch the terrified face of his son as the boy disappeared.
On Tuesday, Kumar still had not found his son’s body, so there cannot be a burial, a proper goodbye. And a father’s heart is as empty as the menacing ocean is deep.
“What else is there left in life? I have lost my son,” he wept outside the ruins of his home in the port area of the southern Indian city of Nagappattinam “My God, what did we do wrong to lose him?”
A cruel hoax
Malaysians shocked by the waves that killed scores of their fellow citizens were being pestered by a prankster-fueled frenzy of cell-phone text messages that warn of further calamity.
Thousands of people are receiving messages that urge caution by residents and visitors in the northwestern resort island of Penang, where the highest casualties occurred.
“Do not go to the seaside or cross the Penang bridge between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m.,” one message read. “EARTHQUAKE may happen again.”
Royal kindness
The Bergman brothers, 3-year-old Nils and 18-month-old Hannes, survived the disaster in Khao Lak, Thailand, and made it to neighboring Phuket with their father, Carl Michael Bergman. But the mother of the Swedish family, Cecilia, remained missing.
Hannes Bergman was found unconscious by a tourist near a Khao Lak swimming pool and reportedly was taken by a Thai princess – his father was not told which one – to a local hospital by helicopter.
Carl Michael Bergman still held hope his wife would be found, but he also had a message for the princess who saved his son: “She has saved his life, but also my soul because I couldn’t survive if I lost them both.”
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