Worried parents stop at nothing to locate children

PHUKET, Thailand - Narkis Koral, 23, and Oren Mesika, 24, were unaware of the devastating tsunami that hit Southeast Asia. They were having a good time on the island of Koh Chang in Thailand and only learned of the earthquake hours later, through friends who received phone calls from home.

Even though the pair, both from Arad, escaped the tsunami's wrath, it did not change the fact that their parents were worried.

"Our mothers were hysterical," says Koral. "They asked us to leave immediately and return to Israel. They offered to arrange flights, anything we wanted, just return."

Dana Kuchansky's father is also worried. Kuchansky, 28, and her partner were in Kofun, a small island hit hard by the tsunami. After a night spent on the top of the mountain in the center of the island, the two were evacuated without a scratch to Bangkok, where they were expected to fly to Israel.

On the telephone, the worried father made sure his daughter received the replacement tickets lost in the disaster. Distraught, he called her again 15 minutes later, to remind her of the flight number.

Most of the Israelis visiting Thailand are backpackers. They are young and on a limited budget. Their parents are used to having insufficient contact with their children. In most cases, this contact is when the phone call or the use of the Internet is cheap, even if the difference between "expensive" and "cheap" is less than 50 agorot.

When parents need to find their child, they turn to any available resource along the traveler's path: the embassy, various travel agencies, the Chabad House, even restaurants.

Notes such as "Gadi, call home urgently" are a common sight in the spots that Israeli travelers frequent in Asia.

In a disaster of such magnitude, when parents are panicking, there are no limits to how far they will go; whoever is in the area of the disaster - from journalists to aid workers - receive calls asking whether "you have heard something" about their child.

In one case this past week, a worried mother called the cellular telephone of each of the six embassy staff in Thailand, one after the other. The same duty officer answered all six.

Yossi Goldberg of the Chabad House in Bangkok said more than 1,000 worried parents called during the initial 48 hours after the earthquake.

"They say, `My son is called so and so and this is what he looks like. Have you seen something,'" Goldberg says.

The Chabad House put up a long list of names on the front door and Goldberg says this is how many families located their missing children.

The dining hall at the Chabad House is crowded with Israelis who survived the disaster. They are sitting around, eating schnitzel and talking about the events. Four young women from central Israel - Vered Raviv, 28, Michal Ziv, 24, Revital Ben Shimon, 29, and Sharon Grady, 30 - managed to escape the tsunami on a mountain top on the island of Ko Phi-Phi.

"We had a single cell phone and managed to send an SMS," they recall.

The common reaction of both parents and children, once telephone contact was made, was sobbing with relief that the ordeal had left them unharmed.