Art helps to pick up the pieces (From Stroud News and Journal)

Art helps to pick up the pieces

WITH tiny hands clutching their coloured crayons, the children drew images of horror.

Bodies floating on water. A helicopter searching for corpses. The wreckage of their homes. All drawn from memory - the images that no child should have to see.

At the age of just 18, Natasha Whiting had rushed to Phuket from her teaching post near Bangkok days after the tsunami had wiped out thousands of lives.

With her English colleagues the Stroud teenager, who had left the Acorn School in Nailsworth just months before the disaster, went to help the hundreds of orphaned and traumatised children in the refugee camps.

Deciding it was vital to help the children express how they were feeling, she set up art and English classes in the camp. But still she was unprepared for the graphic images that confronted her.

"They were just really awful pictures," she said.

"They would draw a big wave and draw their house being washed away, or bodies floating on the water.

"But I think it helped them move on. At first they would draw these horrid pictures but by the end they were drawing pretty pictures of boats and trees."

At the first camp, Khuek Khak, where Natasha stayed for three weeks, the small team were the only white visitors.

They worked seven days a week, from 7am until midnight to help the thousands of dazed and bereaved villagers pick up the broken pieces of their lives.

"We were a real novelty for them," said Natasha.

"The women would come up to us and touch our skin. When we left they were all crying and climbing into the van because they did not want us to go.

"I couldn't cry - I had no right to cry."

Although the bodies had been cleared from the beaches the destruction was incredible to behold.

"All that was left of these celebrity resorts - some of them used to be £7,000 a night - were foundations and a few trees," said Natasha.

"The swimming pools were filled with suitcases and photographs. There were clothes hanging from the trees.

"We saw a boat that had been swept two miles inland and landed in someone's house."

In the second camp, Pak Weep, the team moved onto the only bungalow left standing on the beach and were able to teach the children in a local primary school that had been left unscathed.

It was during this time that Natasha's mother Sarah Whiting, a bursar at the Acorn School, arrived in Thailand with more than £3,400 the school had raised. The duo immediately set to buying as much as they could for the locals. They purchased fishing equipment, fridges, washing machines and other supplies. In Thailand, it seems, a little money goes a long way. "We bought a year's supply of nappies for a man who had just £25 a month to support him, his two children and his parents," she said. It was while she was on the spree that the scale of the human tragedy was brought home to Natasha. She visited the nearby Buddhist temple where, three months after the tsunami, there were still a thousand bodies waiting to be identified. "We went to the temple and I saw the pictures of the bodies and smelt the smell," she said. "These bodies were barely recognisable. A family we bought nappies for could not identify their mother's body because it was so far gone. "That just brought it home to me. Until then I think I was being quite nave." But at the camp, the arts centre was coming on in leaps and bounds. With the Acorn school cash the pair were able to buy more arts supplies and help get more children involved. And despite the huge losses they had suffered, Natasha was amazed by the resilience and good humour of the Thai people. "They are still smiling, they are always happy," she said. "When they were watching the footage of the tsunami they were laughing, saying 'that's where my house was' It was amazing." An aspiring photographer, the young volunteer took more than 4,000 photographs while in the camps. She plans to run an exhibition of her work and sell some pictures to finance another trip to the camp. For now, she is back safe and sound in her home town, after showing that however small the contribution, one person can make a difference to dozens of lives. "I do feel proud of what I did and I am happy I went," she said. "It is not going to make a huge amount of difference. A lot of people have gone and done what we have done. But I had the time and the resources and I was able to help. "That is why I went out there in the first place - to help people." If anyone can help Natasha exhibit her work in the Five Valleys, call her on 01453 759993.