Imagery: Stories: Asian Tsunami

The 2004 'Christmas Tsunami' killed an unknowable number of people in counties across Southeast Asia, though official counts top 230,000. I arrived expecting countless injured and dying people and rampant disease, but what I found when I got there was an eerily clean wound, as if cut by a surgeon. Those in the path of the wave perished and those out of reach survived, often unscathed. But on the ragged edge were the psyches of the coastal peoples who made livelihoods on the very waters that killed their families and countrymen.