Notebook: Tsunami – One Year After

Barry Petersen Visits The Tsunami-Stricken Region One Year Later

(CBS) 

Day Four
KHAO LAC, Thailand

Maybe it was because it happened so close to Christmas. But across America, people raised millions for tsunami victims.

But a few Americans went a step beyond. They came to Thailand and checked in at the volunteer center which sent them out to work. And that’s how we met Jackie Dyer, sprinkled with sawdust.

A Connecticut native, she came here five months ago and today is helping build furniture at a workshop about the size of a double garage, nicknamed Thaikea. Jackie pays her own way - about $400 a month for room and board, and she’ll stay as long as her bank account allows.

Her feeling about her experience?

“This has been about the best five months of my life,” she told us.

And she talked not of what she brought when she came to Thailand, but what she will take home.

“How to be resilient, how to move on from something we can’t even imagine. It’s really inspirational.”

Not far down the road, we hooked up with an old friend Scott Carter. We first met Scott when we visited this area six months ago to look at the rebuilding.

Scott ran his own engineering company near his hometown of Charleston, which he folded when he decided to come to Thailand after the tsunami. That was a year ago. He’s now the boat builder of Khao Loc with a workshop at Cape Pakarang.

They’ve launched 40 boats so far under Scott’s watchful eye – long boats designed for ocean fishing, to replace the hundreds wiped out in the tsunami.

The boats are paid with donations — about $3,500 will buy one, and they will even paint your name on the boat. Part of the deal is sweat equity – the fisherman must help build his own boat.

“From a selfish standpoint,” Scott told us, “I will always be a better person for having done this. This is not my home, this is not where I’m going to stay.

“I’m going back to my life, but I’ll be a better person.”

And here’s something about those boats Scott is building. Long after he goes back home and starts his American life again, those boats will still be out there in the Andaman Sea, off the Thai coast. Fishermen will be making a living on these boats for 15 or 20 years.

Remember that proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for life. Scott and the others are doing that – giving people back the tools they need to rebuild not just houses or shops, but their lives.

These Americans — and other volunteers from Sweden to Switzerland, from Belgium to Britain — came to give of themselves. How could they know that they would leave richer than when they arrived.