|
Killer wave quotes
02/01/2005 11:55 - (SA)
Hong Kong - Quotes over the past week about the tsunamis that devastated large swathes of South and Southeast Asia on December 26:
"The sea is coming inland." - panicked scream heard by Sri Lankan resident Waruna Premachandra as the tidal waves hit.
"The children are still in shock. We looked death in the face." - Italian grandmother Maria Boscani after landing in Rome from the main tourist hub in southern Thailand, Phuket.
"Without my wife I don't want to live. But because of my child, I will." Sri Lankan Pala Withanage.
"I thought my parents didn't want me anymore." - Six-year-old Taiwanese girl Yeh Chia-ni who was rescued after being separated from her mother in the Thai resort of Phi Phi when the tsunami struck.
"People were screaming and kids were screaming all over the place, screaming 'help, help'. And after a few minutes you didn't hear the kids any more." - Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova who clung to a palm tree for eight hours in the devastated Thai resort of Khao Lak.
"The New Year, I don't know when that is, I don't want to talk about it." - Frenchman Nicolas Debray, 28, lost his five-month old son, who was drowned, and his 80-year-old grandmother, who died in his mother's arms.
'We are still alive'
"He has lost it." - An attendant at Baiturrahman mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, helping an old man with a festering wound on one of his legs who, he said, had yet to utter a single word in two days.
"I just want to help people." - Thai hotelier Khun Wan offering free food and accommodation to foreign tourists struggling to cope in the aftermath of the tidal waves.
"Despite their own losses, they took care of us." - Dutchwoman Irene Nicastro, who was forced to flee empty-handed as her hotel room in Galle in southern Sri Lanka filled with water.
"If the body is in a condition to be moved, we put it into the mass burial pit and if it's too decomposed, we pour diesel over it and burn it with debris from thatched huts. Usually the pyres have 20 to 30 bodies at one go." - A man named Subash, saying he and others had pulled out some 840 bodies over two days from flattened fishermen's shacks in Nagapattinam, southern India.
"We are still alive. I'm happy I finally met someone from outside. Please let people know that we are still alive because people think the whole of Meulaboh has been destroyed and no one survived." - Army sergeant Lazuardi, in on the northwest coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island, believed to have taken the full force of the tsunami.
'Misguided and ill-informed'
"I did not work for three days after my best friend Ning was crushed to death by two cars over there." - Thai sex worker named Lek, pointing to the remains of a massage parlour at Patong beach on Phuket island.
"The indications are the disaster is going to be a lot worse than we have anticipated already. Aceh really is ground zero." United Nations Children's Fund communications director John Budd.
"We must look ahead to rehabilitation and putting communities back on their feet. It will be a long, long process, it will take years. We hope that the donors stay with this." - John Sparrow, a Beijing-based expert from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed." - US President George W Bush when asked about UN official Jan Egeland's remark that wealthy countries were being "stingy" with aid.
|
News
