Posted on 01/07/2005 7:39:56 AM PST by ddtorque
They're known as "the team that sleeps with the dead" -- a group of [Israeli] forensic workers who have matched body parts to identities after countless scenes of carnage in Israel. Now in Thailand, they have only one way to describe the aftermath of the tsunami: a disaster, literally, of biblical proportions.
...[The Israeli team] Zaka came with Israeli dental, fingerprint and DNA experts to resort areas in southern Thailand to help find and identify missing Israelis. But they have ended up working on as many victims as they can, of all nationalities.
"Everything we know in Israel, all the terrorist bombings don't begin to compare to what is happening here," Meshi-Zahav said.
...they toil nearly 24 hours a day at Buddhist pagodas transformed into morgues to identify those who died in last week's tsunami, which ravaged swaths of Thailand's resort coast.
"When we are getting ready to leave at 3 a.m., we're the only ones that are still with the dead," Meshi-Zahav said.
In Israel, Zaka collects body parts at bombing scenes to ensure complete burial, in accordance with Jewish law.
That experience..has helped them identify corpses faster than many of the other 20 or so forensic teams that have come to Thailand, making them much in demand by grieving families...
...The team also knows about the agony of uncertainty.
"It's about the torments of the soul that the families and their friends have so long as their loved one hasn't been brought to burial," he said.
That knowledge pushes them in their search, which Meshi-Zahav describes as a "calling."
.."In all this pain of the families, you see a family that has gotten a confirmed identification and been able to bring back their loved one. You see the relief. There's no greater feeling than that," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Where are all the envirowakos when you need them?
They should have been standing at the beaches with anti-wave shields! LOL
Interesting story thanks for posting it.
That is pretty interesting.
Now you're over here after posting your vanity thread!
Easy does it. The guy might be a moron, but .... troll? We'll see in the long haul.
Well, after reading his first post and seeing his backpedaling lame reason for his first post... *shrugs*
Then he posts his vanity thread, and then runs to this thread.
But you're right, we'll see.
Bless them for the sacrifice they are making.
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