Two enormous waves have had a massive impact on the lives of the Moken or Chao Lay, the nomads of the Andaman Sea. The first of these in a sense created them – a mythical wave that, echoing legends of great deluges in mythologies the world over, is said to have struck the earth and left the survivors to wander the sea on houseboats. The second is the 2004 tsunami that devastated the coasts of Thailand and Burma, home to the oceanic nomads, threatening their very existence.
A widespread media-created rumour suggests that the tsunami claimed no victims among the Moken. Suarama Moken, head of the community of Koh Surin (one of five islands inhabited by the Moken in the Surin archipelago, off the Thai coast) says they were 'warned in advance by the fish, of the arriving "freak wave",' as well as by their ancestors, who guard their villages. But of course, this story is only partially true, fuelled by the Moken's close relationship with the sea. In Koh Surin, I counted over 40 mounds of sand and soil – the graves of those who died in the tsunami.
In a sense, every Moken has been 'killed' by the tsunami, as the wave took much of their ancestral lands and forced many of them into a nomadic life. Others have been forced to shift from their traditional subsistence economy to a 'civilised' way of life. As for the most unfortunate ones, when they returned after the tsunami they found barbed-wire fences and armed guards patrolling construction sites on their traditional lands.
Today, there are about 7000 Moken living around the seas between Thailand and Burma. They interchangeably claim Indonesia or India as their place of origin, an ambivalence that gives the Thai government an excuse to deny them citizenship. It is also not uncommon for them to be shot at by the Burmese coast guard when they cross the international border in search of fish.