GIANNI MAIANI
Tsunami: Interview with a Moken of Andaman Sea




    Description of the contents
     
     Mokens were the sole people to forecast the arrival of tidal waves
    With 275.000 victims and 15 countries involved, the Tsunami of the 26th December 2004 was the most catastrophic natural event of the modern history.
    Among the failure of systems and technologies of the "developed societies" there was an exception, constituted by a small ethnic minority: the Moken, also known as “Sea Gypsies”. The exception is surprising if one considers that Moken have adopted a very basic style of life, in antithesis with anything technological. All that they want and need is a boat for house and the sea as the “Country” where to live. The relationship between the Moken and the sea is so deep that among the generations they have adapted their eyes for a better and clear underwater vision.
    Without technologies, but with unrivalled knowledge of the sea, the Moken ran up to the hills of the islands immediately before the Tsunami of the 2004.
    How they could know?
     May other Tsunami have hit the area in the past?
    My supposition was that another similar catastrophic event must be happened there in the very far past. After all, the Moken live between the archipelagos of Thailand and Myanmar, just in front of the submarine faultline that separates the Indian and Indochinese tectonic plates. My idea was therefore that the memories of another ancient Tsunami could be transmitted through the generations with the stories narrated by old Moken in the villages.
    Therefore, we had to find a old Moken that could eventually corroborate and confirm (or contradict) my idea. The main obstacle was related to the communication since Moken have their own language and there are not so many that can speak also Burmese or Thai. Anyway, with a bit of luck we found Chaleh: an elderly Moken able to speak a southern slang of Thai language.
     Interview : Old Moken Chaleh talks about the Tsunami of December 2004
    The old Moken talks about the minutes antecedents the arrival of the killing waves. Chaleh talks about a sequence of three waves (*) and the interpretation that the man gives to the retracting sea is fascinating: he says to have identified in the absolute calmness of the environment a situation of potential danger. When he saw the sea going away, he looked at the hills to check if the Earth was bending (therefore causing the water to flow away). After having got the confirmation that was not the Earth, but the sea to be “wrong”, he tried without success to save the boat, and then he gave up and launched the alarm. His words did not get lot of credit, since even the younger and less expert members of his family did not believe him, but at the end everybody followed his directions, running up to the hills.. just in time, as the waves arrived taking away everything, including the precious boat of the family (which sometime Chaleh calls "home").
     Interview : Old Moken Chaleh talks about other experiences of Tsunami
    My hypothesis about an ancient catastrophic Tsunami evoked in the stories of the Moken finds only a partial support in the words of Chaleh. He says that in some old stories (boran) the retracting sea was somehow related to a status of danger and to the presence of "giant waves". The stories, anyway, apparently do not include any specific reference to a particular event of the past. But the really surprising element is that the capacity of Chaleh to forecast the arrival of the waves cannot be entirely attributed to the so called boran. In fact, he says to have already experienced two Tsunamis when he was living in the Mergui archipelago. Attributing a date to those two events is not possible, as Mr. Chaleh says to not know his own age. Nevertheless, Chaleh tries to give a temporal reference saying that by time he was not a child, and he could already dance, sing and work. It is possible that the two Tsunamis he talks about may have happened about 40-45 years ago, before the birth of his wife, who instead has never seen a Tsunami before the 2004.
     Conclusions
    The capacity of the Moken to catch the signals of danger preceding a Tsunami may be partially attributed to the existence of stories (boran) related to unspecified Tsunamis of the past. Those stories, anyway, doesn't refer in a precise way to a specific, ancient Tsunami.
    In addition, the ability of the Moken to forecast the arrival of Tidal waves may have been reinforced by direct and recent events: Tsunami that must be had quite violent (enough to generate fear in the Moken) but at the same time provoked by well localized telluric movements (while in the Tsunami of 2004 it was involved an exceptional movement of a whole plate along 1200 Km of faultline).


Notes: sunset of a old culture?
The Moken always considered their boats as their "houses" and the sea as their "Country". The relationship between the Moken and the sea is so deep that along the generations they have adapted their eyes to see better underwater. Refractory to concepts as "nation" or "border", the Sea Gypsies moved freely between the archipelagos of Andaman Sea, crossing the border between Myanmar and Thailand. The governments of those Countries are obviously not inclined to encourage "border crossing" in total freedom. While very little is known on Myanmar side (some sources reported persecutions on Moken from the military regime), in Thailand the Moken are subject to a census targeted to give them basic services as education and medical aid. We have visited an elementary school for Moken and we got a good impression: the management is left to volunteers that do their work with passion, and everything seems to be done with respect for the culture and the traditions of the Moken. But even good purposes have a price. Permanency slowly modifies the lifestyle of that ethnic minority. Even the unavoidable contact with other cultures (here including those represented by the tourists) makes the Moken more and more accustomed to the use of objects that apparently cannot be anything else than useful (engines, fins, underwater masks), but that in a slow and silent way end to erode capacities and skills built through centuries. The old Moken, who is one of the few left that still call his boat "my home", seems to be aware of the changes, as he expresses a resigned forecast about the next generations.


Moken elementary school
What a Moken child can draw? Among about fifty drawings, we did not see any with a subject different from the sea.
Education: a Moken child learnt that cigarettes are harmful to the health. Better to let it know also to parrot fishes before they start smoking.