The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

Erin she needed to get to the hospital to see her son. Upon seeing how upset she was, Erin offered to accom- pany the woman by taxi to the hospital, and together they found the son in his room. Back in Phuket, David Sch- wartz, Bangkok’s fraud prevention officer, accompanied the father to the bungalow where his family was stay- ing, and helped him to retrace the path of the wave, enabling him to find a shoe and some articles of clothing belonging to his daughter. His daugh- ter’s remains were finally identified by the international Thailand Tsunami Victim Identification teams at the end of February, and the father has returned to Thailand to bring his daughter’s cremated remains home. In the first week after the tsunami we issued more than 120 free emer- gency passports and 27 on-the-spot loans, many in the middle of the night, so American citizens could return home. Most of them had lost everything except the clothes on their backs, so the embassy began collect- ing clothes, toilet articles and food for them. Colin Crosby, a political officer assigned to Bangkok, heard that a couple was in the consular section with their baby and had no formula. He ran home and brought back a case to give to the family. Our officers traveled to local hospi- tals to assist with completing passport applications for nearly a dozen Ameri- cans seriously injured in the tsunami. We also went to a private home to issue a passport for an injured 6-year- old girl whose parents and two broth- ers are all presumed dead. She is now under the guardianship of her aunt in Singapore. Embassy volunteer spous- es, organized by the CLO, traveled daily to visit all Americans hospital- ized in Bangkok, providing books, clothes and cell phones for the Americans to call their families. One volunteer took an injured woman to find her son, who is studying Thai boxing in a local gym without a phone. They hadn’t been in contact since before the tsunami. Another spent the night at the bedside of an injured teen. The countless hours these vol- unteers devoted to the injured Americans put a human face on the caring attitude displayed by the embassy as a whole. Our enormous efforts would not have been possible without the out- standing support we received from throughout the embassy and from the Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington. While most of us here in Bangkok have returned to routine work, some staff continue to work on tsunami-related issues, and to assist the families who lost loved ones in the disaster. With fewer than 10 percent of the more than 5,000 victims identi- fied, this work will continue for a long time to come. Embassy Bangkok Detective Work Pays Off When the tsunami hit Thailand, over 7,000 Americans were placed on our list of “not accounted for.” The vast majority of these people were actually okay, but any time any American called the department and said, “my cousin is in Thailand and I’m worried about his safety following the tsunami,” or “I haven’t heard from my brother in Thailand in two years; do you think he was in the affected area?,” we made a case file. Both Embassy Bangkok and the task force in Washington not only created files for each and every call, but also began the long arduous task of trying to account for everyone on the list. Callbacks were made day and night to determine whether the person had checked in with his/her family. As time went on we began researching local American Citizen Services files and archived passport records to look for possible phone numbers of other family members and friends, or emergency contact information. As the list of not- accounted-for shrunk to below 100 names, the work became more diffi- cult and we began using bank, phone and immigration records in Thailand (information we would normally have absolutely no access to, were it not for the tsunami). We sent Scott Hansen, helping out from American Consulate General Chiang Mai, out in an embassy car to a half dozen addresses in the Bangkok area when we had no phone informa- tion. This task can be compared to finding an address in the Washington metropolitan area, but with no accu- rate street maps or phone books. He found three of the six people he was searching for. Our Phuket consular team (which at one time numbered more than 20 officers and FSNs) spent days searching for Americans based on clues like “he lives on a duck farm” and “his apartment is by the sea with a small Thai restaurant and a cig- arette stand out front.” We “googled” dozens of names, and in one case we came up with a golf handicap for a gentleman we were looking for on a golfing Web site. That site led us to a golf dis- count membership for a number of golf courses in the Pattaya area of Thailand (far from the affected area). ACS FSN Nita Lertkaruna began calling golf courses on the membership list until she found one that had an e-mail address for the man we were looking for. We sent him an e-mail and received a response the next day — the gentle- man was fine, not affected by the tsunami at all, and he compared our detective skills to Dick Tracy’s. We have received e-mails from dozens of Americans, not only thanking us for finding their relatives, but in a few cases for reuniting them with relatives and friends they had not heard from in years. Of the over 7,000 people we began looking for, we’ve accounted for all but two, and 48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 5