Sawadee ka! Hello and good morning from Kao Lok. Another day in the coal mines coming up. We work 6 days a week and take Sunday off. The Tsunami Volunteer Center MAKES everyone take one day off because it can be so overwhelming. I have discovered that the only way for me to put anything on the blog is to get up extra early and arrive at the center before we all go to our respective projects. There are about 150 people here. Some have been here since the begining and will be here as long as they are needed. Some have been here a month and are leaving in another month. Some people were just traveling around backpacking and decided to come here and help. They are not taking anymore volunteers who would be here less than 2 weeks because it is so difficult to train someone new everyday. There are alot of different projects here. Gordon and I are on a building crew working at a village called Taptuan that was totally wiped off the face of the earth. The people are called the Morgahn and they are sea gypsies. They aren't actually Thai citizens and Thai is the second language. They speak a combination of Thai, Indonisian and something else I can't remember now. Most of the village, including the animals, survived because before the first wave came the animals started acting really upset and freaking out. They all ran for the mountains and the people knew something was up so they took off too, fast. The same happened on the Similian Islands. When the sea went so far out, the village people knew that the sea was going to "eat them" so they high tailed it up to high ground. There wasn't a single death in his village and they saved about 300 additional people. We hear amazing stories everyday. This morning was sad though. Our hotel is about 1 mile from the Center and we usually hitch hike. I am so sick of hitching rides. I can't wait to get back into my VW instead of a back of a truck. We decided just to walk to work today and on the way, we pass a small police station. We are out in the countryside so there isn't much around. When we passed the police station, we went over to look at the notice board. They had all these pictures of people that are still missing. Small children, entire families, husbands and wives. There were also morgue pictures that we weren't expecting to see. They are unidentified bodies and we couldn't even tell what race they were. There was an old Thai man there looking at the pictures. He said his house was washed away and two people in his family are still missing. They are dead of course but people have a hard time thinking that it could be real. Kao Lok where we are was the hardest hit part of Thailand. We are just north of Phuket. Everything is gone. There is an enormous police ship ( like the coast guard) that is nearly a mile inland. The tsunami carried it so far and just dropped it. They are going to leave it there as a memorial. The ship was guarding the King of Thailand's daughter and grandson who were staying here. The grandson had something wrong with him. Like autisim or something like that. He died in the tsunami so that is why they are leaving the ship there. I think it would be pretty impossible to move it anyway. I better go meet my crew. Hopefully we will have a truck arranged, but most of the time we have to hitch.

Gotta go. Love you all so much. Bridgett Joyce