Tsunami relief: Local aid agency gathering money
By Scott Maben
The Register-Guard
Sunday's devastating tsunamis across southern Asia sent waves of concern as far as Eugene.
A local relief and development agency with close ties to India is raising money to provide food, medicine, clothes and blankets to survivors there.
Brent Hample, executive director of Eugene-based India Partners, said a colleague who runs a relief agency in Machilipatnam, a city of 200,000 on the southeast coast of India, described in an e-mail message a scene that was both grim and chaotic.
"We went to the beach with our team," the Rev. Parishudhababu Gadelli told Hample. "(We) saw dead bodies coming up on the seashore. Hundreds of fishermen's small huts were erected on the seashore; all those huts were blown away."
"On Sunday morning, the Hindu people came for a holy bath in the ocean," Gadelli said. "All of a sudden the place became a graveyard. We were not able to control the people that lost their loved ones. Approximately 75 people have died at the seashore. Still people are looking for dead bodies that were caught in the trees near the sea."
India Partners, which has helped build schools and medical clinics there over the past 20 years, has pledged to send $1,000 and hopes to raise more for relief efforts. The agency has a staff of four and spent about $337,000 on its programs last year.
Local residents also have been trying to check on the welfare of family members in the region affected by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the resulting waves.
Serena Sukrutham of Eugene spoke Saturday night with her mother, who lives near the Indian coast and frequently visits the villages hit by the deadly tsunami that threw a 10-foot wall of water on shore.
"She knows those towns. She told me that the village she usually goes to for her gospel meetings was affected," Sukrutham said. "There were 15 deaths over there."
Sukrutham visited the area last February and said she can picture the scene clearly.
"I feel bad for those who passed away. It's so sad," she said.
Her husband, Alfred Sukrutham, is part of a team sponsored by the Eugene Seventh-day Adventist Church that is planning a three-week mission to India to build a church - their 11th there - and connect with church members next month.
The focus of the trip may change to more humanitarian needs, church officials said.
The ocean swells spawned by the strong quake left victims in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand.
Payung, owner of Mekala's Thai Cuisine in Eugene, said she's been trying to check on relatives in Thailand, but phone lines apparently are jammed or damaged. She said she's worried about her sister, who prepares and sells food to tourists on the coast.
"We have not heard from them. No calls are getting through," Payung said. "We hope soon everything will be OK."
A 1991 South Eugene High School graduate vacationing in Thailand sent his parents a message describing how the waves tossed him around the inside of a bar.
Sam Nicols, 29, a nanotechnology research engineer at Chalmers University in Gothenberg, Sweden, said he was rock climbing at the beach in Tonsai, Thailand, when a series of waves appeared on the horizon.
"When I first saw them, they were about ( 5/8 of a mile) from the beach, so we did have quite a bit of warning," Nicols wrote his parents, John and Marianne Nicols of Eugene.
"The tide was so extraordinarily low that it took seven or eight waves until the water was really reaching up towards the buildings," he wrote.
He packed up his belongings and ran to a nearby bar, where he paused to snap photos of the approaching waves pounding sailboats in the bay.
"I took about 10 pictures and then realized that the waves were going to hit the shore and I was in a bad spot," he said.
Nicols turned and started to run, but the rushing water hit him from behind and swept him into the bar.
"I remember chairs banging into me and maintaining some sense of balance in the (five feet) of water that was in the bar. I got to my feet ... and I was struck again from behind by another wave which pushed me up against the bar," he said.
Soaked, he climbed into a disc jockey's booth to escape the surge. He saw that an Internet cafe and massage parlor next door had been washed away.
"I got a couple of scratches, but survived remarkably intact," Nicols said.
On Monday, he said, climbers and tourists were helping locals sift through the rubble, tear down broken buildings and start to clean up.
"The Thais have been giving away food that is spoiling, and in general a very positive atmosphere is present," he wrote.
John Nicols, a history professor at the University of Oregon, said his son first sent a brief message Saturday night, before the couple even had heard about the quake, saying he was all right.
"The magnitude of the problem was not clear to us at first," he said. "Only the next morning, when we turned on the news, did we begin to appreciate how serious it was."
TSUNAMI RELIEF
India Partners, based in Eugene, is raising money for disaster relief on the southeast coast of India
Call: 683-0696 or (888) 870-9085
Write: India Partners, Tsunami Relief, P.O. Box 5470, Eugene, OR 97405
On the Web: www.indiapartners.org
