THAILAND: At a Buddhist crematorium not far from the Bang Muang refugee camp, Huang Martthong is burning the bodies of the dead from Namkem and Khao Lak beach, reports Clifford Coonan.
Out in the open, Mr Martthong stacks up tyres and sets them alight. He then puts the bodies on top.
They throw up big plumes of black smoke as they burn.
"We are cremating the bodies here because the families live in the north somewhere and they cannot afford to bring the bodies back there," says Mr Martthong, who is a funeral director by trade.
The crematorium is in a makeshift mortuary. It contains about 800 bodies of mainly Thai victims of the tsunami, which are DNA-tested, tagged, have a microchip inserted in their mouths and are then buried at a depth of about two metres.
The bodies are being stored beneath the earth because the Thais do not have enough refrigerated containers to store all of them. The location of each body is marked with a stick containing numbered notes.
"All the belongings have been kept, too," says Ludvin Fischer, a Swiss volunteer who is working at the mortuary.
"We remove the bodies when the relatives come with a DNA match. It's a heavy job, a lot of us have no experience of this kind of work and are not used to using a shovel. I dug up one body the other day and it took half an hour to extract the corpse," says Mr Fischer.
A Thai volunteer, Chana Phadoongmai, who is an agriculture student, says that they try to avoid disinterring the bodies too often because of the heat and the fear of further corruption.
"If a family comes, we will take out the body. But if we have to take a body out lots of times, then it goes bad. We try to do it one time, not more," says Mr Phadoongmai.
"We still have new bodies arriving for us to store. There were 20 yesterday, but none have come so far today."
The bodies are transported to the crematorium from Wat Yanyao, which is the central mobile morgue set up to identify victims of the tsunami. Once identification is confirmed, the family either takes the body away or decides to have it cremated by Mr Martthong.
"We'll burn the body if you're sure it's your loved one's body," he said.
"There's one person from this morning. The family are on their way to collect the ashes," he says, pointing to a pile of bones and ash on the ground.
