SACO (AP) – A year later, Heather O’Meara still has trouble finding the words to describe the destruction she saw in Thailand caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated much of Asia.

O’Meara, 27, was in shock when she first walked the beach and saw the ruins at Khao Lak, a tourist and fishing town where more than 4,000 people died as a result of the tsunami.

“I was speechless – like I am now,” she said between customers at a coffee shop in this southern Maine town where she works.

A year after the fury of the tsunami laid waste to cities and villages and killed more than 200,000 in a dozen countries, Mainers who volunteered in relief efforts agree that they are changed from the experience.

O’Meara, who went to Thailand with New Life Church in Biddeford, and her husband decided to become teachers so they would have summers off to help rebuilding efforts in areas in need.

George Friou of Portland got to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in January and spent much of his first month there helping the military remove bodies from the rubble. The city, he said, had the smell of death.

Friou trained new midwives and nurses and organized public health efforts in the city, which lost a third of its nurses and doctors and its 450-bed hospital. After seeing destruction like that, Friou said his life is changed.

“I don’t take life so seriously anymore. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen,” said Friou.

Dr. Lisa Torraca of South Portland, who works in the emergency room at Mercy Hospital in Portland, has volunteered over the years in war-torn nations such as Liberia, Kenya, Rwanda and Kosovo. But volunteering in Indonesia wasn’t anything like that, she said.

“It was different from the perspective that the enemy was nature,” she said. “There was nobody to get mad at, it was just this incredible, military-like destruction.”

Copy the Story Link