TSUNAMI RELIEF Diverse group builds boats, homes, furniture, solidarity

The volunteer center has found work for people from 51 countries since January.
KHAO LAK, Thailand (AP) -- Four months after the tsunami struck, Andy Chaggar gave up his engineering job in England and returned to Thailand to help rebuild houses near where his girlfriend was swept to her death.
"It seemed irrelevant to go back to my old job and work for a profit-making company," said Chaggar. So now he manages a housing project for some 180 Thais in the village of Thap Tawan, in the Khao Lak resort area 360 miles south of Bangkok.
The killer wave that struck Dec. 26 killed 5,400 people in Thailand; 2,436 were foreigners. There are 2,800 people still missing. In 11 countries affected by the earthquake and tsunami, more than 176,000 people died. The disaster left 50,000 missing and hundreds of thousands homeless across the region.
Since the disaster, thousands of people from around the world have used vacation time or interrupted careers to help out.
Broad participation
There's Scott Carter of Georgetown, N.C., making fishing boats, and Joa Keis, from Corvallis, Ore., teaching English. Dive enthusiasts are scouring the seabed for debris. Others comb the beaches. The visitors make everything from playgrounds with brightly colored swings to furniture for newly rebuilt homes.
The Tsunami Volunteer Center says it has found work for more than 3,500 volunteers aged 19 to 67 from countries as diverse as Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany and the United States -- 51 countries in all since the center opened in January.
Sombat Boon-ngam-anong, the program's Thai founder, marvels at the sight of Christians, Buddhists and Muslims working together to rebuild their homes.
"I see the universality and open-mindedness, which goes beyond religions and races," he says.
"At Thap Tawan, when the volunteers finish building a house, you will see their photographs pinned on the wall. Villagers still talk about this and that volunteer," Sombat said.
He fondly remembers a spirited, one-legged woman in her 40s named Elle, helping to rebuild houses.
"When we saw her working, we felt that we couldn't do less than what she did," he says.
Filling a void
Some stay just a day; others have been here for eight months. Some are here for the first time; others, like Chaggar, were here when the wave struck.
The couple from Leicester, England, were on the seventh week of a round-the-world trip when the tsunami pounded their bungalow on the beach at Khao Lak. Chaggar survived with a broken collarbone and badly injured legs.
His partner, whom he prefers not to identify, was washed away and her body identified only six months later.
The young engineer returned home and struggled to cope with the absence of someone who had been part of his life for six years. In April he returned and was recently with six other foreigners mixing concrete under a glaring sun.
The work helped him to get over his loss.
Thousands of fishing boats were destroyed, leaving many villagers without a livelihood. So Scott Carter closed his small engineering firm in North Carolina and moved here in March. He and other volunteers work with fishermen to produce a boat every three weeks, each at a cost of about $3,250.
Using donations from Americans and other donors, they have built 36 boats and aim to build 47 in all before turning the enterprise into a commercial one run by Thais.
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