Candles in the wind for tsunami families

They gather on the beach, shielding candles from the wind.

In one way or another, the tsunami made each of them an orphan.

Five lost their parents when the wave hit. Another, born three months after, was abandoned by her mother who couldn't deal with the trauma.

The youngest - an eight-year-old girl called Nook - was born to a survivor who had ingested the swirling, dirty water on Boxing Day, 2004, infecting her with what doctors described as a "tsunami cancer" which slowly killed her. She died after giving birth.

Now the seven look after each other. A family born in tragedy.

"Some of them make me so proud," says Rotjana Phraesrithong, the woman they call their mother.

Rotjana was living in Bangkok when she saw news of the devastating impact of the worst natural disaster in living memory.

With vast swaths of the Andaman Islands hit and a Thai death toll numbering in the thousands, she answered a nationwide call for volunteers and got on a flight to Phuket.

She had planned to help out for two weeks. That was 10 years ago.

In the days immediately after the disaster, Rotjana erected a tent in Khao Lak, one of the worst-hit regions, as temporary shelter for the children who kept being handed to her because there was nowhere else for them to go.

"I stayed for two years in that tent," she says.

"I didn't go back to Bangkok. Because if I went back, all those children would be orphaned again because they would have no one.

"After two years, I decided we had to build a house so the children could stay together."

It was 2005, a few months after the tsuanmi, when she met Peter Baines, an Australian police forensic specialist who had flown to Thailand to work as part of the disaster victim identification team.

He was so affected by her work that he decided to form a charity to help and called it Hands Across the Water.

It is evening in Khao Lak and we're sitting in the result: the Baan Than Numchai Foundation orphanage, where Rotjana's tent used to be.

The sound of laughter fills the building. Children are running around. Finger paintings paper every wall.

"I stay here because I love the kids," Rotjana says.

"I want them to grow up and have a future.

"Many of them make me proud. And many of them make me sad."

Marshalling the children are several of the original ophans she sheltered in her tent. Now in their 20s, they come back to help out.

Thailand didn't suffer losses on the scale of Indonesia or Sri Lanka, but the legacy has scarred the country, particularly Phuket.

Twenty-three Australians are known to have died in Thailand (18 Australian nationals and five permanent residents) but, 10 years on, the total death toll for the country is still a matter of contention.

Official documents, including statements released by the Australian Government last week, list the Thai toll as about 8000.

But Alan Morison, an Australian expat who edits a news website in Phuket, said a misunderstanding in the tragedy's aftermath wrongly inflated that number.

"There were 5400 bodies and a list of more than 3000 missing," he says.

"When the disaster victim identification team identified the dead, they crossed them off the missing listas they went along.

"But that process didn't seep through to other Thai Government departments."

This resulted in an official document that added the 5400 bodies recovered to the 3000 people listed as missing, ignoring any crossover. The true Thai death toll, he says, is just under 5400.

A short drive from the beach where Rotjana's orphans have lit their candles is the Tsunami Victim Cemetery in Bangmuang, where the bodies of the unidentified were laid to rest.

Four hundred and sixteen headstones are numbered and arranged in neat blocks.

A decade later, 369 of the people buried here have still not been identified. Their bodies have been buried wrapped in plastic in metal coffins lowered into concrete tombs to help preserve their DNA for as long as possible.

But Nitinai Sornsongkram, the caretaker of the graves, says the money ran out a long time ago and the department that oversaw the gravesite has been disbanded.

He now tends the grounds unpaid and on his own.

"In the future, I want to make it look more like a memorial but the problem in Thailand is politics," he says, as heavy drops of tropical rain start to fall on the cemetery.

"People in Bangkok don't focus on here.

"I would like them to identify more bodies so we can send them home to their families.

"It is time."

I want them (the kids) to grow up and have a future." *Rotjana *Phraesrithong