3/30/05 Contact: Katie Wilder, 334/844-9999 (wildeka@auburn.edu)
David M. Granger, 334/844-9999 (grangdm@auburn.edu)

RECENT AU GRAD WITNESSED TSUNAMI'S DEVASTATION, AIDING THAILAND'S RECOVERY

AUBURN – “Where were you when the wave came?”

It is a question that Courtney Furlong, a recent Auburn graduate, has heard many times.

Furlong graduated in December following a vocational rehabilitation internship with the International Labor Organization in Thailand. She was still in Thailand on Dec. 26, when the tsunami struck southeast Asia.

Immediately after the disaster, American and European tourists who survived the tsunami began flying from the coast to Bangkok. Thammasat University in that city provided shelter for the evacuees, and Furlong joined the relief effort there as a translator between the English-speaking tourists and the Thai natives.

“I only speak a little Thai, so I helped by calling names on the intercom of people who needed to catch their rides to go to the airport and giving out information to the tourists,” she said.

“Everything was so unorganized because Thailand doesn’t really have an emergency system set up,” Furlong explained. “They never really have natural disasters – no flooding, no fire problems, no earthquakes, no hurricanes.”

She added, “When the tsunami hit, they didn’t know what to do. It was pretty much chaos.”

In early January, she traveled to the coast, the hardest hit area in Thailand, with a group from the Campus Crusade ministry to a “displaced persons camp,” which was filled with residents from nearby Nam Kem village.

At the camp, the group set up tents, handed out sleeping bags, built temporary housing, constructed bathrooms, cooked food, sorted donations, surveyed residents about the possessions they had lost, entertained children and ministered to victims and relief workers.

Furlong said it was hard to watch as volunteers surveyed the village’s surviving residents to catalog what they were missing. “I am thankful that I don’t speak fluent Thai so I didn’t have to do that. It was just too difficult because the people had lost everything,” she said. “I remember two kids – one was 9 and one was 15 – just walking around. They didn’t have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nothing. They’d lost everyone and everything.”

The recent AU graduate said there were approximately 4,000 refugees from Nam Kem at the camp, which she described as “the town of the living dead.”

She explained, “These people were just sitting in their tents with everything they owned.”

She will soon begin coordinating trips through Campus Crusade to travel with Thai students to the country’s southern region and help in the clean-up efforts while reaching out to distraught villagers.

“There wasn’t a single family there that was not affected by the death of a loved one,” she said. “They all feel really guilty. They said ‘If I had done this, I would still have my child’ or ‘If I had done that, my husband would still be with me.’ They all feel like it is their fault that they lost family members.”

Acting on a desire to do mission work following graduation, Furlong asked a professor last spring to help her find an internship that could lead to mission-related work. During the internship last fall, she worked with the Thai government to develop vocational assessments to help officials make proper placements for clients with disabilities. During the internship, she absorbed local culture and befriended many Thai students.

Furlong, a rehabilitation services education graduate, now works with Campus Crusade as a missionary and an English tutor at the Grapevine Campus Ministry in Bangkok.

Because she was unable to return home for graduation, Furlong said her parents came from her hometown of Lilburn, Ga., near Atlanta, to visit her during the Christmas holidays. The former intern said she and her family had planned to go to a beach resort on the coast during the last week of December, but the tsunami hit the coast first. “I was excited about going because I hadn’t gotten to see the beaches of Thailand yet and they are supposed to be the most beautiful beaches in the world,” she said.

When the tsunami slammed into the southern coast, Furlong was at a mall in Bangkok. The region where she was did not feel the earthquake that produced the tsunami or experience flooding from it. She was not aware that anything had happened until she began to receive phone calls from concerned friends.

“They knew we were supposed to visit the coast, so everyone was calling to make sure we weren’t there,” she said. “And people in America knew more about it than we did.”

Furlong said she has learned a lot from her experiences in Thailand. “It made me realize that God is a really big God and solidified my belief that we aren’t in control of our own lives,” she said. “And coming from a different culture, you learn that everybody is really the same and we all have the same needs.”

Auburn University is a pre-eminent land-grant and comprehensive research institution with nearly 23,000 students and 6,500 faculty and staff. Ranked among the top 50 public universities nationally, Auburn is Alabama’s largest educational institution, offering more than 230 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs.

(Contributed by Katie Wilder.)

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