"Look around you," Ratree said. "Everybody here has lost family members." Half of the neighborhood's 20 children are gone; in some homes, it was only the children who survived. Ratree's husband and 14-year-old son are among the survivors.
Now, as the villagers saw and hammer in the harsh sun, they say lawyers and police officers pay frequent visits to warn, cajole and threaten them.
"We just look down and keep working," Ratree said. "They say we are invading their land. We aren't invading. We are rebuilding our homes."
But with its buildings scraped from their foundations and many of its trees ripped out by the roots, this stretch of beachfront is home now only to the dispossessed.
There is one spot of bright color in the dirty sand, four framed photographs propped at the base of a broken tree: a portrait of a military officer, a young monk in his orange robe, a wedding portrait, a graduation ceremony.
Who are these people? Did they survive the waves?
Ratree said she had never seen them before. "The pictures just washed up here," she said, "along with refrigerators, television sets and all sorts of junk."
As for their own family portraits, both of the survivors and of those who died, she said, "We have no idea where they are."
RSS