Drawings by Children of the Tsunami

This is about the drawings done by the children of the Tsunami which killed 286,000 people ten years ago today

This unimaginable loss of life resulted from an earthquake rated 9.1 on the Richter scale in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Banda Aceh in Sumatra - and the Tsunami which followed. In the end people died in 14 countries around the Indian Ocean.

What I didn't know until today was that there were projects to preserve the drawings of the children of the Tsunami.

What caught my eye this morning was a photo by Rein Skullerud in the Guardian. Rein is the Head of Photography Unit, World Food Programme (https://www.facebook.com/rein.skullerud)

Young people who survived the Tsunami ten years ago - with their drawings
photograph by Rein Skullerud, Head of Photography Unit, World Food Programme

The article Indian Ocean tsunami survivors reunited with childhood drawings provides exceptional images of the drawings - and the accounts of what happened to the children at the time and since the Tsunami

I felt very sad looking at them. The drawings also felt to me like they said more about the disaster than any photographs taken at the time.

If you'd like to remember and pay respects to the people who lost their lives, can I commend this article to you as an appropriate way of remembering the dead and celebrating the achievements of the living.

The article also reminds us of the power of drawings as a way of coping with images in our head and remembering things that have frightened us - and things that we have lost and want to remember.

More drawings by children of the Tsunami

This is a website which contains four pages of drawings of the Tsunami made by the children of Khao Lak

These two videos also contains drawings by children involved in the Tsunami - in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Interestingly while researching this topic, I found another article about another Tsunami in Alaska some 50 years ago where children draw what had happened to them. Sadly none of the drawings were reproduced in that article.