SEA GYPSIES.(The Talk of the Town)(nomads)

In the province of Phangnga, some five hundred miles south of Bangkok, a temple known as Wat Samakhitham served as a command center in the tsunami relief effort and as a shelter for more than eight hundred people. By the middle of January, only twenty-two families, mostly fishermen, remained on the grounds. Many refugees had been worried that their land, which they did not own but had legally occupied according to a kind of official squatter's rights, might be turned into tourist resorts. Among those who left the temple was a group of about two hundred diminutive indigenous people called the Moken, or Sea Gypsies, who live on the Surin Islands, which are now a national park.The tribe doesn't keep track of birthdays or age, and follows a traditional animist religion. Its small village had been entirely washed away.

The abbot, a former civil engineer, had urged the Sea Gypsies to remain at the temple. "I wanted them to stay longer, so that they could get nationality and education--so they'd have the legal rights of any Thai citizen," he said. But the Sea Gypsies didn't like the mainland. They were also feeling the pressures of publicity, having been turned into a political football in the upcoming general elections. "Save the Moken!" is now a fashionable campaign slogan, and the tribe may well become to the Surin Islands what grizzlies are to Yellowstone.

The Sea Gypsies decided to leave when the wife of a prominent politician came by the temple and offered to send them home, although there were no provisions for food or shelter on the islands. (care Thailand has donated material to rebuild their huts, but the work had not yet begun.) Against the abbot's advice, most of the clan boarded chartered tourist boats and crossed forty miles of open water. When they got home, they found that everything--battery-powered televisions, stoves, boats--had been swept out to sea. The Moken themselves survived only because they had fled en masse to higher ground.

In the days immediately after the wave, the Thai papers had reported that there was a secret Moken legend about tsunamis, passed down from generation to generation: ...