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Students aid tsunami survivors

The tragedy occurred half a world away, but students at a Tampa Greek Orthodox school still feel its effects.

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published February 12, 2005

TAMPA - The young students thought back to where they were when they first heard about it.

Twelve-year-old Reid Freeman's parents told him when he woke up that Sunday. Muriel Moore, 11, saw the headlines in the newspaper. The pictures of ruined cities scared her.

The day it happened, Dec. 26, was Stella Blake's 12th birthday.

"I was really sad," says Stella, a slender girl with a voice like clear glass. She saw pictures on TV, somewhere in Thailand. "I could see water going through this whole town."

"They said it was so powerful when it hit that they couldn't tell whether the bodies were male or female," says Alex Greene, 13.

It took a while to sink in. The size, the scale.

"I kept hearing and hearing about it, and that's when I really paid attention," says Wylie Allen, 12. "And I saw the death toll at 80,000 . . ."

"And growing," Muriel says.

In a classroom upstairs, parents are filling bowls with spices. The turmeric is thick and yellow, like powdered gold. The cumin is sharp, the coriander lemony. The mustard seeds are hard and strange and look nothing like mustard.

Students at St. John Greek Orthodox Day School are mixing the powders in plastic bags, spooning out measured cups of rice. They will sell the rice and spice mixtures - recipes from Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, Indonesia and the Maldives - at the Hyde Park farmers market today. Any money they raise will benefit tsunami survivors.

Here is what the sixth- and seventh-graders at St. John know about the tsunami:

The wave moved as fast as an airplane.

It changed the shape of the earth and shortened daylight by millionths of a second.

It raised the water, even as far away as Florida.

"I couldn't imagine being hit by that," says Nolan Ruark, 12, a thoughtful fair-haired boy in a navy blue school tie. He shakes his head.

"It was like the World Trade Center," he says.

The others agree. It reminded them of 9/11.

But it was different, too. The 9/11 attacks were intimate; the tsunami so distant that it could have happened in a fantasy world. Fairy tales are written about such things: the ground rising and shifting, a giant wave that devours cities and people. It was beyond the imagination of adults, beyond rational comprehension.

But the kids at St. John feel it. More easily than adults, they can see it.

"People are just wandering on the streets," says Paige Pupello, 11. "And little children just walking around with no parents."

It made them think of The Perfect Storm, a movie Nolan was too scared to see. They heard about what happened to the children there, the ones swept away and the ones who were left.

"People are trying to find the kids who are orphans," Muriel says. "They don't know who's an orphan and who isn't."

They still have questions:

Were there a lot of bodies?

What happened to the rice fields?

Muriel wonders this:

"Wouldn't you know that something bad was going to happen if the water withdrew from the shore?"

Some people knew; some didn't. Many children didn't know, though some, carried to higher ground by anxious parents, lived. When the water receded, boys and men walked out on the open sand. They drowned. Children, smaller and slower than adults, were rolled under the wave like kids caught in heavy surf on a Florida beach. Except the water was a thousand times stronger.

The kids at St. John know that people tend to forget about bad things that happen far away. They also know that memories of death have a strange quality: sometimes they last forever; sometimes they fade and disappear.

"I don't think we're going to forget about this one because it's so big," Nolan says.

"The people who got hit by the hurricanes, they haven't got their houses fixed yet," says Paige.

"In Polk County!" says Alex. "And this was 100 times worse."

"Our teacher says it'll take 10 years to get the houses rebuilt," Muriel says.

"But it won't be normal," says Nolan.

Even then.

Vanessa Gezari can be reached at 813 226-3435 or vgezari@sptimes.com

WHAT: Students and volunteers from St. John Greek Orthodox Day School will sell rice and spice packages to benefit victims of the Asian tsunami. Hot fried rice donated by the Bamboo Club also will be sold.

WHERE: The Hyde Park Open Market in Old Hyde Park Village

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. today

[Last modified February 12, 2005, 00:24:15]