Mokens Survived the Tsunami

Mokens Survived the Tsunami. Here are two sites still available over 3 years after the Great Tsunami in the Pacific(December 26th 2004) that killed over one quarter million people in the western Pacific Basin. Here is the story of how all the tribe of Mokens survived the Tsunami.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/18/60minutes/main681558.shtml

http://www.progressiveu.org/014420-moken-sea-gypsies

We were eating dinner at the wharf on the ocean when once again we visited this subject. It has fascinated me because I have always been interested in cultural anthropology and how peoples survive things for thousands of years without the technology of the last few hundred years available.

The basic story goes something like this. The two sites one at cbsnews.com and the other at progressiveu.org above will give more information if you are interested.

The Moken tribe of about 2000 to 4000 people live off the coast of Thailand in the Surin Islands (a national park). They have lived in this general area for hundreds if not thousands of years. They have no word for (when or worry). Even as a western interviewer tried to make sense about what had happened through his translater he asked his translator why this Moken man was standing next to him. The translator said that the Moken man was waiting for him to leave his boat but that since there is no word for when in the Moken language he will just stand there until the interviewer left. It was okay. The western interviewer had some difficulty dealing with this. However, it all worked out okay in the end.

The morning of the tsunami an elder man in the tribe of Moken Sea Gypsies said to his daughter(who was a mother in her 30s) "We all either have to go to higher ground or we need to take our boats out to sea!" She said to him, "Old Man, have you been drinking?" He said, "No. I am just doing what the old tribal stories said if we want to survive a tsunami." She then started to wonder and consulted more of the tribal elders. They all agreed the signs were there for a Tsunami. These are the signs, the birds fly away to higher ground and all the animals that are not tied up or fenced in go to higher ground. The father, the daughter and all the Mokens got together and those with boats took them way out to sea to ride out the tsunami. The rest went to higher ground on their Islands. In this way they saved all the Moken people from the Tsunami. They also tried to save men on the local big fishing boats but they didn't believe the Moken people and those fishermen all died because they didn't believe.

This is a perfect example of how some people with a tribal memory similar to the singing of Bards in Europe kept their people alive by learning from their tribes histories through oral stories, song and dance and singing. This sort of oral rendition of tribal and national histories is one of the main ways civilizations survived without writing, paper or clay tablets to write or to put hieroglyphics on.

This was just the general way things were done worldwide until the first Gutenberg press was invented.