'Boxing Day is one of my least favourite days," Gill Dalley said, her voice punctuated by the sharp cries of dogs vying for attention in one of the nearby runs.
"The Boxing Day before [the tsunami] I lost my beloved Dad, then I lost my legs, then the following Boxing Day it was [my best friend] Leone. That was all in one year, Boxing Day to Boxing Day."
As she strides confidently on prosthetics across the Soi Dog Foundation headquarters in northern Phuket, delivering food to the more than 300 animals in the organisation's care, there is little to indicate the ordeal Gill was forced to endure a decade ago.
When the tsunami hit, the foundation she co-founded with her husband John was still fledgling — just a handful of volunteers without a shelter to call their own. But it would play a major role in the ensuing relief effort.
The story of the couple's experience with the disaster, however, began some three months earlier, as Gill crossed a flooded field to rescue a stranded dog.
It was a relatively routine task, something she had done many times before in the year since Soi Dog was founded. In the days that followed, however, Gill began to feel ill. When her legs began to change colour, turning dark shades of blue and grey, it was clear something was very wrong. Doctors delivered a grim prognosis: Gill had developed septicaemia, a life-threatening blood infection, from an unknown organism as she waded through the floodwaters. The only way to save her life was to amputate both legs below the knee.
A cat among rubble. Bungalows, bars and hotels on Koh Phi Phi laid to waste by the tidal waves that struck on Sunday (27 December 2004).
Gill spent the next three months in intensive care at a Bangkok hospital, recovering from the surgery to remove her legs. She set herself a target: get back home to Phuket by Christmas. On Dec 22, Gill wheeled herself out of hospital. Four days later, she and John awoke to what seemed like a perfectly ordinary day.
"We never felt anything. And then it would have been about 10.30, we got a call from our maid who was on a day off in Phuket town," John said.
" 'Are you okay,' she asked. 'There's been a big wave.' And I said, 'Yeah we're fine.' I really didn't think too much about it."
On their way to a nearby pub for Boxing Day brunch, John and Gill drove past Laguna Beach. They found a few restaurant owners mopping up, but no signs of any major damage.
"Then we got a call from Margot [Homburg], who was also a co-founder of Soi Dog, to say that Leone [Cosens], a volunteer in the south of the island and Gill's best friend, had been killed," John said. "We got back home and turned on the TV to see what was happening, and started to realise this was something much more than what we first thought."
While the focus would later turn to the thousands of stranded and abandoned animals along the Andaman coast, the couple's first thoughts were of helping the people in Khao Lak, who had been hit hardest by the waves.
Gill, still in a wheelchair and without prosthetics, was not mobile enough to help in the recovery operation. Instead, she camped out at Takua Pa Hospital, helping comfort the thousands of trauma victims who were piling through its doors.
"They were all in shock," Gill said. "All they wanted to do was to tell their story, cry, be hugged and loved. And I spent my time listening and talking to people. Okay, I don't know what it's like physically going through the trauma of actually physically being in the tsunami, but I know what it's like to go through a trauma, and it was very recent, so that helped me a lot to understand what they were going through."
John, meanwhile, headed for the coast, where he spent the next three days performing the macabre task of wrapping the bodies of the thousands of dead.
"They were all just stacked up, and you would just see huge male tourists, weighing, you know, 300 pounds, next to the bodies of children and toddlers, all stacked up," he said.
"And then it was literally just going down the road, you would pick a body up — four of you generally because obviously some of these were very heavy. A lot had rigor mortis still there, a lot were decomposing and flesh would come out in your hands as you were moving them. And you'd have to break down the legs and things which were stuck up in the air, and then tie them together.
"They would give you a mask, but it was very hot so I tended to not use the mask. … One of the overriding memories is the way the stench clung to you, even wearing clothes, when you got home you could still smell it."
After three days, international rescue crews began to arrive; as the initial chaos of the recovery effort dissipated, John and Gill's help was no longer needed in Khao Lak.
But along the coast and on outlying islands, thousands of animals were left abandoned and without food. Some problems were more unusual — a humpback dolphin had to be rescued from a lagoon near Kamala after being washed more than 1km inland by the waves. Others were more orthodox — decomposing bodies mixed with large pools of stagnant water and hungry animals meant the threat of disease was high.
It was at this point that Soi Dog kicked into gear, buoyed by an influx of volunteer vets from abroad.
"There are various animal welfare issues that crop up in any disaster, regardless of where you are," John said. "Obviously, the first thing for locals in that situation is to escape, and they don't think about their animals at that point, so they're left behind."
John led teams of vets up and down the coast, establishing makeshift clinics in Khao Lak, Phuket and Phi Phi. From there, they would sterilise, vaccinate and feed the thousands of animals left stranded by the waves.
"You had situations, for example in places like Patong, where you had quite a large population of beach dogs who rely on the local restaurants and tourists, that's their food source," he said. "That was gone, so it was a case of giving them food and making sure they were fed so they're not getting into garbage and becoming a bigger nuisance by searching around for food."
- The Fisherman
- The Survivor
- The Rescue Pilot
- The Photographer
- The Searcher
- The Nurse
- The Body Collector
- The Animal Lovers
- The Returned
- The Benefactor
In other tsunami-affected countries like Sri Lanka, reports emerged of malnourished dogs devouring human body parts they had retrieved from the rubble, while packs of desperate animals roamed the streets attacking survivors and volunteers. In Thailand, thanks in part to the efforts of John, Gill and the Soi Dog volunteers, those types of reports were limited.
"In any situation like that you're going to get rubble, shortages of food, you're going to get rats come out and all the rest of it. Dogs are going to go for them, and they can pick up diseases like leishmaniosis, which can be transmitted to humans," John said. "So really you're trying to ensure the disease side is under control, vaccinating the dogs.
"At the same time, you're also sterilising the dogs as well, so you're not having puppies born in areas which, at that point, could not sustain them.
"Also, dogs on islands where everybody had left, evacuating those because otherwise they would starve to death."
With only a small team to work with, John enlisted the help of locals. Many, like the survivors of a devastated village in the south of Patong, were happy to lend a hand. "All their homes were destroyed, but they were still living there, and there were a lot of dogs there," he said. "So we'd go and actually give the food to the locals, and they'd feed the dogs. So a lot of what we were doing was just distributing food."
On the mostly Muslim island of Phi Phi Don, where hundreds of cats were left behind, using local help was not an option. "Most people on Phi Phi were evacuated, so there weren't many people on Phi Phi when we were working there. But again, the cats had been left, so it was a case of them just roaming around, pitifully thin," John said.
As John immersed himself in the field work, Gill, who would take more than a year to learn to walk properly with prosthetics, was mostly confined indoors.
"Even though I was in a wheelchair, I still worked in the clinic doing the after care, booking in animals in my wheelchair with my clipboard on my lap and my pen in my mouth," she said. "Yeah, my role changed, but I still had to be there."
One of the memories that has stuck with both John and Gill was the lack of animals that were killed by the wave.
"There are all these stories about animals having a sixth sense," John said. At a temple in Kamala, the monks told John that all of the dogs had climbed the bell tower before the tsunami hit. Others told stories of snakes heading up to the hills, or elephants carrying children to safety in the minutes before the waves rolled through.
"We didn't come across many dead dogs who had drowned in the tsunami," John said. "We didn't see many dead animals around at all." n
TODAY
Through the Dalleys' hard work, the Soi Dog Foundation is now stronger than ever. “At that time we were a very small operation,” John said.
“Gill losing her legs in October, then the tsunami and with Leone being killed, many people thought that was the end of Soi Dog.”
Instead, it proved the beginning of a remarkable success story. Soi Dog has since purchased land near Phuket’s Mai Khao beach for its own shelter, capable of housing more than 300 dogs, as well as opening a clinic in Bangkok.
“Instead of us shutting up shop, which after the death of Leone and [Gill] losing her legs could have happened … from that point on we were able to employ a couple of vets and a couple of dog catchers and expand on what we’d always planned to do.”
On a personal level, Gill says her experience helping trauma victims acted as a kind of therapy that has helped her come to terms with her own circumstances.
“I think it was good because I was focusing on other people,” she said.
“I mean, I will never know how it would have been had it [the tsunami] not happened. But logically, I think on a personal level it was a good thing in a way that I was kept so busy and I didn’t have time to dwell on anything at all.”
It took Gill nearly one year to learn to walk again with her new prosthetics. Today, her disability is barely recognisable as she fights her way inside one of the dog runs, mobbed by canines eager to display their affection.
“Without the tsunami, it might have still just been John and I doing this,” she said, looking around at the small army of volunteers that now swarms the bustling compound.
“It’s taught me a lesson, what with my legs and then the tsunami, no matter how bad you think things are at a particular moment in time … out of something so bad … something so good can come out of it.” n