Christmas & tsunami remembrances

We are gearing up for Christmas celebrations as a family and at our Thai church. I have wrapped up 50 bags of candy to give to the kids that show up for the church party. The whole region here is also gearing up, to remember the devastating tsunami that came Dec 26th, the day after Christmas. There are memorials planned at different key points throughout the region. At Phuket where the rest of the victim's remains, now just bones, are. At Baan Niang, and at Takua Paa, where we worked at Yan Yaw temple, processing the dead. We will go. I've wrapped gifts for the family that gave us a bedroom to use while we helped at the temple, and for the man that arranged it for us. I am thinking of all the people that came to help from all over, and all the people that saw the horror of it first-hand, of those that came to the morgue/temple Yan Yaw looking for their loved ones, and of the dead... And people are coming back to remember, still devasted, still traumatised. A Thai friend told me tonight there was a European man that came back, he was here when it happened, and he was afraid to get in the water. Who could blame him?