Two months ago I was writing about Christmas and how it had been developing in the course of the past centuries. I gave some examples of how people have been losing the grace of facing the real background of Christmas, which is the birth of the Saviour. Writing this article I was also thinking of those who prefer to celebrate an alternative Christmas in a hotel in the Caribbean Sea or in the Far East. I decided not to mention them. But now I have to.
Many of those who celebrated Christmas on a tropical beach or under a huge Christmas tree in a hotel-lobby somewhere around Phuket in Thailand or Sri Lanka do not live anymore. It was a tremendous seaquake offshore of the Indonesian island of Sumatra that caused one of the greatest and dreadful natural disasters of mankind. More than 280,000 have died.
December 26th, morning, thousands of residents and tourists were having breakfast or were entering the beach already, when they noticed a mysterious phenomenon of nature: the shore water receded back into the ocean, more than a mile! But it was much too early for the low tide. Acres of land were seemed to be drained. Now kids and adults, wondering about what had happened, rushed out to look for shells or to take pictures of what they saw - until water came back in three giant waves.
It is impossible for us to imagine how thousands of people were running to save their lives. Although all of us have been watching videos taken by afflicted tourists it is hard to believe what we´ve been seeing. A mass of water, a so-called “tsunami” (which means “huge wave in the harbor”), flooded the shores in eight countries in the Indian Ocean, from Indonesia to Somalia and Tanzania, two East-African countries. Hotels, dwellings, cars, trains, and thousands of human beings were carried away by the water.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi Annan, called this tsunami the “greatest catastrophe UN-member states have ever been inflicted with”. Larry Burt, a US Air Force Pilot, an Iraq-war-veteran, said he had never seen such wretched and deeply destroyed landscapes before.
Today, there are still about 500 Austrians, among them three Burgenlanders from Unterwart and Markt Allhau, missing. 10 Austrian tourists are already declared dead by the Secretary of State. The tourists who survived can return to their home-countries in Europe or Australia, some of them are hurt. But 80.000 Indonesian residents in Sumatra have died of the tsunami. Millions of people in these areas have lost their relatives, their children and parents, but also their homes. Epidemic diseases may hit those who survived the disaster itself, in the next few weeks. Thousands of children will suffer from diarrhoea caused by the contamination of water. Most of them will die of it. There is still an enormous amount of human corpses which have not been buried or burned yet. How long will it take to bring peace and rest to the people in the Far East?
Please, help and contribute: this is the meaning of the Christmas of 2004.
Please help!

Yours Walter Dujmovits, jun.