After the Waves: The News Articles, Part 2
The Hoboken Reporter, January 30, 2005.
Back in June, I posted the article that appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger on December 29, 2004. I had written that post when I took my little “trying to shake my funk” road trip to Cape Cod back in May. Today, I am writing this on Tuesday, November 8, 2022, which is Election Day in the U.S. The funk has lifted for the most part, just in time to make room for my anxiety to fill in the cracks about today. I figured working on writing this will focus my attention on this post and keep me off of Twitter. Also, there was a full moon lunar eclipse last night - the last one of its kind until 2025 - and my horoscope told me to lay low today.
The Hoboken Reporter story focused not so much on what we experienced in Phuket, but on what we wound up doing when we got home. Here’s where the idea of lost memory pokes its head in. I don’t remember exactly how this reporter found me. Maybe via the Star-Ledger article. I also don’t remember whether I met him in person, or spoke to him over the phone. I do remember something about a connection with a bar in Hoboken that used to be the “Eagles” bar.
Hoboken is pretty much a New York sports town, and I’ve always been a Philadelphia sports fan. There was a bar on Washington Street that catered to, and hosted Sunday Eagles game watch parties. There was even some sort of “organized” group that would hold meetups. I think it was called the Hoboken Eagles Club. I have no idea how we interacted - this was before social media and group texting - but I have some kind of scrap of a memory that we did. For some reason I thought I remembered (I guess I mis-remembered) that in the Hoboken Reporter article it was mentioned that I was part of this group.
The article talks about a charity we got involved with when we got back called the Phuket Project. It was a volunteer group set up by Mach Arom, a Thai man working in advertising in NYC. How we found them, I don’t remember. Maybe they found us. Either way, we did get involved and we did it pretty soon after we got back. This article was published after Usheen and I held our own fundraiser at a long-shuttered, favorite fondue spot in midtown called Dip. RIP Dip. Also, RIP Mach. He passed away in August of 2006 at the young age of 38.
How we (or maybe this is just a “how I”) managed to pull together a fundraiser some time in January 2005 is beyond me. We didn’t get back to the States until after the new year and the article was published on January 30. We had props and pictures and all the types of stuff you pull together to support a cause.
I was a traumatized disaster in January 2005. In all honesty, I was a traumatized disaster for months into 2005, so to be able to have the wherewithal to pull this - and another fundraiser in March - together is beyond me. Chalk it up to a disrupted adrenaline response or the fact that I knew that if I slowed down to let myself re-adjust I would crash.
Anyway, this is the article that was published less than a month after our return and our first fundraiser. Unfortunately, the Phuket Project has disbanded, and I was not able to find much current info about its beneficiary, the Kamala Child Development Center. I believe the center is now this school that is managed under the wing of an organization called Phuket Has Been Good To Us.
The below was posted to my old WordPress site, “After The Waves” on March 29, 2009.
Surviving the Waves: The Hoboken Reporter Article
I mentioned in my last post that I was going to post the stories that were printed in the local media. This is the one that was printed in the Hoboken Reporter, the local paper of Hoboken, NJ, the city just outside of NYC that I called home at the time. There are a few inaccuracies, now that I am re-reading it, but nothing that I feel compelled to correct right now. It talks a lot about the charity that Usheen and I began working with when we got back, which is another whole leg and arm to the story that I haven’t even mentioned yet. I considered not posting this one yet, but after I re-read the one that The Star Ledger printed, I thought that one was too much and too graphic for right now. This is a peek into some of the good that came out of the bad. It is as important, or even more important than the story itself. Unfortunately, the Phuket Project was disbanded. The founder, Mach Arom, a dynamic man and creative genius, died suddenly in 2006.
Tsunami survivor raises $$ to rebuild Phuket
Charity will go to reconstruct community center
By Tom Jennemann, Hoboken Reporter staff writer
January 30, 2005
Hoboken resident Kim Selby, saw firsthand the destruction from the tsunami that struck South Asia the day after Christmas.
She and her friend, Usheen Davar, were on vacation in Phuket, Thailand, eating breakfast at a beachside restaurant when the deadly tidal wave struck. As they rushed to the roof of their hotel, they witnessed the immense devastation unfold below their feet.
For two hours, they stayed on the roof, trying to decide what to do. When to water receded for a moment, they made a break for it, which included climbing brick walls, until they made it to a 17-story high-rise further inland. That is where they spent the night, sleeping on the floor with the water still below them. With help from their families and friends making endless phone calls from home, they took a flight two days later from Phuket to Bangkok, where they stayed for a couple of days before they were able to get a flight back to New York.
“We’re going to be forever affected by what we saw,” Selby said. “After coming home, I knew that I wanted to help the people of Phuket. The outpouring of support since we’ve retuned has just been amazing.”
Phuket Project
Now that they’re home, they want to do what they can to aid in the relief and rebuilding effort.
“We understand that there’re hundreds of fundraisers and charities being set up as part of a tsunami relief effort, but we wanted to get involved and do something to help,” said Selby Tuesday.
She added that wanted to support a charity that directly benefits the people of Phuket, and she selected the Phuket Project (www.PhuketProject.org), which is a collection of more than 150 global volunteers who are organizing volunteer efforts to help local Thai communities rebuild.
On Tuesday, Selby and Davar hosted a benefit at the DIP Lounge in Midtown Manhattan, where their friends and business associates gathered to learn more about the Phuket Project and donate to the cause.
Spread on top of the pool tables of the lounge were about a dozen newspapers that Selby and Davar collected while they were in Asia. Along the walls on tripods were pictures the two took the day of the tsunami.
One of the most striking pictures was of the café at the hotel they were staying. The first picture was of a small and quaint ground level café; the second was of brownish water rushing through, with debris being swept along by the wave.
“That’s where we were eating breakfast just a little while earlier,” remarked Davar.
There was not an empty table Tuesday. Young professionals mingled, talked and donated.
Davar, who lives and works in Manhattan but is originally from New Jersey, added that while they were able to come home, the natives were left to rebuild their lives from scratch.
“We may have lost material items such as our luggage, clothes and money,” they said in a letter to friends, “but unlike many, we have come back to a home, family, job and friends. Many of the Thai residents of Phuket have lost their businesses, homes, jobs, schools, and some cases, their families. They are in immediate need for cash and other assistance.”
The story of the Kamala Center
The story of the Kamala Child Development Center is just one of the many heartbreaking stories in Phuket, and throughout South Asia. But if the work of hundreds of volunteers is successful, it doesn’t have to end that way. On Monday, Dec. 27, the brand new Kamala Child Development Center on Kamala beach in Phuket was due to open its doors to almost 200 children from the local community.
For over two years, the Phuket community came together, held benefits and raised funds to build the community center for children between the ages of 3 and 6. On Dec. 26, the building was finished, with a sparkling blue roof and hand painted murals on the walls. Those who had worked so hard to build the Kamala Center, the parents, teachers and children, were unaware of what was about to happen.
But one day before the scheduled grand opening, the tsunami swept the center away. Maya Gorton, a volunteer with the Phuket Project in New York City, said, “At least the center wasn’t filled with hundreds of children, like it would’ve been the next day. You can always rebuild a building.”
In partnership with the Bangkok Phuket Hospital, the volunteers of the Phuket Project hope to raise money to help the local community rebuild the center and work alongside the Thai people to architect and reconstruct the building for the children and their families. The goal is to raise $125,000.
For those who want to do more than just give cash donations, the Phuket Project is also going to be sending groups of volunteers over in the spring and summer and help with whatever is needed to get the building functioning again. For more information or to make a financial contribution, go online to http://www.phuketproject.org.
Note: Because the story is pretty old at this point, there is no URL available to link to the source material and the Hoboken Reporter now lives as a vertical under the umbrella of the Hudson Reporter. The story was written by Tom Jennemann, and I offer a credit to him by linking to his Twitter profile here.
© 2022 Kim Selby, All rights reserved. All photography © Kim Selby unless otherwise credited.