[Hillary's Lovely Legs]

Muslim women collect donations in an umbrella following a prayer service for the victims of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Aceh Province, Sunday, at Al Azhar Mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia.

[TBall]

I'm sure this story has been posted on FR, but I just read it and thought it was incredible.

http://www.detnews.com/2004/nation/0412/29/-45717.htm

[facedown]

Great post! Here's another one:

Boys play at a refugee camp in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The number of people living in refugee camps in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh has risen to more than 270,000, the government said.

[facedown]

Just found this one too:

An Indonesian survivor is carried towards a medical tent by a US Navy medic upon arrival Monday January 3, 2005 at Banda Aceh in northwest Indonesia. US Navy's Sea Hawks helicopters have been shuttling back and forth to far-flung areas in the largest relief operation since the Vietnam war following last Sunday's earthquake-tsunami catastrophe in Asia that killed more than 150,000 people, with Indonesia suffering the most number of casualties of more than 80,000 people.

[pubmom]

Very uplifting, positive thread- thanks. We can get so bogged down in the horror, that we fail to see the good around us.

[LadyPilgrim]

These photos are a bright spot in this devastation.
I love seeing "USA"on those bags! Thank you for pinging me!

Happy New Year to you and yours! God bless us all!
And God Bless America!

[crushelits]

[SuziQ]

One of my favorite stories of survivors is the one of the Swedish family, about which there were pictures on a thread a couple of days after the tsunami. There was a group of three pictures of people running away from the tsunami at Patang Beach in Thailand; all but one woman. She is running toward the water in the first two pictures, and you just had to wonder why. In the third, you can see that she was running towards a group that is desperately trying to outrun the water, and you can tell by her slump that she knows they'll never make it.

It was discovered a few days later that all of them survived! The group trying to outrun the water was the woman's brother, her brother in law and her three sons. The woman's husband and sister were on the beach watching the situation. The wave swept them all up and tossed them around, but they were all able to re-gain their footing and were helped off the beach before the next wave hit.

I was so thrilled to read they had all survived. You could just feel the woman's desperation at trying to reach her family, and then horror, realizing that she'd never make it, by looking at the pictures.