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Unit 1
The Sea
Gypsies
?
It
was
Christmas
night in the United States a year ago that a giant
wave of Tsunami
hit
South
Aisa. It swept
away at least
200,000 Indonesians, Sri Lankans,
Thais
and tourists from around the
world on their Christmas
vacations. But
there’s one group who live precisely
where the tsunami
hit
hardest
who suffered no casualties at
all.
They are the sea
gypsies
of the Andaman Sea, or as they
call themselves,
the Moken
.
They’ve
lived
for
hundreds
of
years
on
the
islands
off
the
coast
of
Thailand
and
Burma.
As
reported
last
March,
they
are,
of
all
the
peoples
of
the
world,
among
the
least
touched
by
modern
civilization
.
And
miraculously they survived the tsunami
because they knew it was coming.
It's their
intimacy with the
sea
that s
aved them. They’re
born on the sea, live on the sea, die on the sea.
They
know its moods and motions better
than any
marine biologist
.
They're nomads, constantly moving from island to
island, living more than six months a
year on their boats.
At
low tide
, they collect sea
cucumbers and
catch eels
. At
high tide
, they
dive for
shellfish. And
they've
been living this way for so
many generations that they've
become
virtually amphibious
. Kids learn to
swim before
they can walk. Underwater,
they can see twice as clearly as the rest of us,
and by
lowering their heart
rate
, can stay
underwater
twice as long. They are truly
sea
urchins
.
This old man decided he wanted to fish
for breakfast. It was a pufferfish. If it's not
cut
properly, it can kill
you. The Moken cut it properly.
?
We found this
Moken village on an island
two hours by
speedboat from the coast of Thailand
.
It had become
something of
an exotic tourist Mecca
before the tsunami.
A Bangkok movie
star and amateur photographer named
Aun
was here on December 26,
taking pictures of Moken village life, when
someone noticed
the sea receding into
the distance
.
Correspondent:
“How far?”
Aun:
“Like...you
see the blue one?”
Correspon
dent:
“Yes.”
Aun:
“Can you see the blue water? You
didn’t
see any
water.”
Correspondent:
“
No kidding
. You
could walk all the way out there?”
Aun:
“Yeah.”
Aun continu
ed
taking pictures. They show
ed
the Moken on the beach crying.
Correspondent:
“Did you have any idea why they were
crying?”
1
Aun:
“I feel like
they know
what bad
will
happen, but I don’t know how much
bad.”
And Aun’s
pictures showed
the Moken fleeing
towards higher ground
long before the
first wave struck.
Aun:
“The first
water, just come like..., over here.”
Correspondent:
“The water got that high?”
Aun:
“Yeah...”
And that was just the first wave. The
worst was yet to come, as the Moken knew because
of signs from the
sea.
It
wasn’t only the sea that was acting strangely. It
was
the animals
, too. On the
mainland,
elephants
started
stampeding toward higher
gro
und. Off Thailand’s coast,
divers
noticed dozens of
dolphins swimming for deeper
water
, And on these islands,
the
cicadas
, which are
usually so loud, suddenly went silent.
?
And
the silence was heard by Saleh
Kalathalay
, that
skilled
spear-fisherman
who was on a different
part of
the island. He ran around
warning everyone.
Correspondent:
“When you told people in the village,
you said something was wrong, did they believe
you?”
Kalathalay:
“The young people called me a liar. I
said, ‘
we’ve told the story of
th
e wave since the old
times,
’ but
none of the kids
believed me. I grabbed my daughter by the hand and
said, ‘Child, get out of here, or you’ll
die!’ She said, ‘You’re a liar, father,
you’re drunk.’
I hadn’t had a drop to
drink
.”
Saleh
brought
the
skeptics
t
o
the
water’s
edge
,
where
they,
too,
saw
the
signs.
Eventually,
everyone,
the
Moken and the tourists,
climbed to higher ground and were saved. But the
village itself? There’s nothing left.
Correspondent:
“Why do you think the tsunami
happened?”
Kalathalay:
“The
wave is created by
the spirit of the
sea. The Big Wave
had not eaten anyone
for a long time, and
it
want
ed
to
taste
them
again.”
Correspondent:
“Do you think that they consider
themselves very unlucky because their village was
destroyed or
lucky beca
use
they survived?”
Hinshiranan:
“
I think
they
just take it as a matter of
fact.
”
Dr Narumon
Hinshiranan is an anthropologist, one of the very
few who speaks the Moken language.
Correspondent:
“
Tell
me
what
is
it
in
you
mind
that
permitted
the
Moken
to
know
that
the
tsunami
was
coming?”
Hinshiranan:
“
The
water receded very fast and one wave, one small
wave
, came so they recognized that is
not
ordinary.
And
then
they
have
this
kind
of
legend
that
passed
from
generations
to
generations
about
seven
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