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For their own good Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
From his condo, he watched a wave wipe away his community. Since then, he has scuba dived to recover bodies.
By TOM ZUCCO
Published January 5, 2005
TODAY'S COVERAGE
[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
Kansharupan Sivaruban, 22, bathes from a well in front of the ruins of his home Tuesday in Valvedditturai, a small fishing village on the north coast of Sri Lanka that was heavily damaged by the recent tsunami. Many residents jostle in the streets and plead for help.
Buy them coffins. That was all Henry Aruffo could think to do. He knew the families with money could afford a casket. But hundreds of unclaimed and unrecognizable bodies were being brought to the Buddhist temple. They would have nothing.
So Aruffo, a retired University of South Florida geography professor who was at the temple to attend a funeral, paid $250 for 10 coffins. "They're Masonite, painted white, and they're small," he said Tuesday from his home on Patong Beach, just west of the resort town of Phuket in southern Thailand. "About 6 feet long and a foot wide. You see, the Thai people are not very big.
"At least they had some dignity in their final moments. How can you not reach into your pocket and take whatever you have out?"
Since he moved to Thailand 14 months ago from Tampa, Aruffo has lived on the eighth floor of a condominium overlooking the Andaman Sea. He was planning to spend his retirement teaching people to scuba dive, working on conservation projects and watching the sunsets. A Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, he thought he'd lead a quiet life.
The tsunami that devastated Thailand and 11 countries in southern Asia has changed those plans. And he said what he's seen is worse than anything he encountered in Vietnam.
But recovery, Aruffo said, is finding its way to this part of the country. Although the U.S. relief effort has been questioned, most Thais whom Aruffo has spoken to express only gratitude.
Visits by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to Phuket "showed them that the world cares," he said. "In Phuket, it's very well-organized. At the command center, where Gov. Bush was today (Tuesday), there are tables with interpreters, food, water and signs up on message boards.
"But those are horrible. All these faces of missing people."
The biggest problem, said Aruffo, 55, is with the poorest residents. The fruit peddlers, the people who cook chicken on mobile carts in the street, the maids and gardeners. The ones who lost everything.
Aruffo said an estimated 10,000 people lost their jobs in an area where the average worker makes about $180 a month.
"But there's not a lot of looting," he said. "Not in Thailand. The people here are reserved. They realize this is part of what life is supposed to be. I guess that helps them some. A little more inner strength and peace, and an understanding that there is suffering in life.
"But I think in the future there will be some post-traumatic stress disorder."
For now, the biggest toll is measured in human lives.
"I know of 14 Thai people who have lost someone in their family," he said.
In that list is the woman he buys pineapples from every day at the corner outside his building. She runs a push cart and her three children help.
But two of those children are missing, as is the woman's sister.
"They were on the beach Sunday morning," Aruffo said, "sitting under the trees."
More than a week after the disaster, there are scores of people still missing, he said. "The local paper Monday said it was 4,800, and of those, about 2,000 or so are foreigners.
"It takes so much out of you.
"But each day, you go down to the crisis center and enter pictures of the missing into the computer."
About 10 o'clock on the morning of Dec. 26, Aruffo was evacuated from his building when an earthquake was detected. But within 20 minutes, the residents were allowed back inside.
Less than a half-hour later, as he was sitting on his porch drinking coffee and reading a Tom Clancy novel, he heard screaming. He looked toward the beach and saw people scrambling to higher ground as a 20-foot wave made its way up the beach and into the streets.
The water scattered cars, telephone poles and ATMs in its wake.
Then it was gone.
Because he's an accomplished scuba diver, Aruffo volunteered to help with recovery efforts. In two basement grocery stores under a shopping center across the street from the beach, his team brought out 60 bodies the first day, about a third of them children. The next day, he helped cap oil and gas leaking out of tourist and fishing boats that had been sunk.
But by midweek, he couldn't go on. He had contracted a massive ear infection, which he thinks is the result of diving in water filled with bacteria from decaying bodies. His sense of balance was affected, and he still has difficulty walking.
"I scrubbed myself with bleach and even gargled with diluted bleach," he said. "It didn't help."
The last two days he has been taking antibiotics regularly.
Aruffo is still not sure what happened to the 20 or so children who helped him with a beach cleanup project last fall.
As soon as he can, he will get back to work on the recovery effort. Besides finding people, there are 2,000 endangered sea turtles missing from their pens, and dugongs - similar to manatees - and dolphins that have been found alive nearly a mile inland.
"What's truly remarkable," he said, "is that somehow, after all this, the people here are remaining positive."
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Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
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