A sister's tragic mission

New Zealander Michelle Bond has been looking daily for the bodies of her brother Stephen and his wife, Janjira, who were holidaying near Khao Lak when the tsunami struck more than a week ago. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Every day at 5am New Zealander Michelle Bond sets out to find her brother Stephen.

She has no hope of finding him alive. She carries a photograph of his body she saw on a wall full of pictures of missing people and unidentified corpses.

She expects to find his body at a temple where the bodies of hundreds of tsunami victims, many of them foreign tourists, lie awaiting identification.

It has now been more than a week since disaster struck and the corpses are decaying fast.

But she is not giving up. She came to Thailand to find her brother and says she cannot imagine leaving his body here.

Stephen Bond, 46, was married to a Thai and lived in Phuket, where he ran a construction company.

Since she arrived to look for him, Ms Bond has been living in his house and sleeping in his bed. Every morning she has made a three-hour journey to the temple at Tukuapa. After a week, she feels mostly numb.

"I cried before I got here. By then I was pretty much sure I was looking for a body so that's what I came to do, really," she says, as the identification teams work behind her.

"Today is not the best day because we had been hoping to find the body or at least sight it, because Stephen has a couple of his toes missing. If I can see the body and definitely say yes, then the forensics team can do the identification.

"Otherwise it is months and months of work. There are thousands and thousands of bodies to be matched."

If her brother has already been tested for DNA he may be in one of the huge refrigerator containers now arriving at the temple.

Mr Bond's Thai staff are with his sister helping her search. "They didn't sleep for the first three or four days, they just threw some blankets on the back of the truck and slept on the spot. And they're still looking."

Yesterday, the Thai Government decreed that families and friends of foreigners should stay away from tsunami-hit areas, including Buddhist temples turned temporary morgues so that forensic teams can get on with their grim job.

Ms Bond though is determined to search on for her brother, rather than leave him unidentified and bound for an unknown grave.

She told the Herald a story of horror but also of miraculous survival.

Mr Bond and his wife, Janjira, have children from earlier marriages. They were holidaying near Khao Lak with Mr Bond's two boys and his wife's daughter when the tsunami came.

One of the boys clung to a floating coconut and another held on to a piece of wood when the giant wave struck. Against all odds all three children survived and are now in Bangkok receiving medical care.

"We knew where my brother and his whole family were," said Ms Bond. "I don't see how anyone could have survived anything and miraculously their children did.

"My brother and his wife were having breakfast on the beach and their children were actually in their apartment, a two-storeyed apartment a bit back, and they got completely washed away.

"My youngest nephew, Joshua, 8, grabbed a coconut which popped up, and Andrew, 10, was grabbed by a Singaporean man, who heaved him on to a piece of wood."

Ms Bond, who comes from Christchurch but now lives in Taiwan, is unsure how the little girl survived.

She is convinced her brother's body is in the area where she is searching. "The photo I have was taken here. It's him. This photo was taken the first or second day [after the tsunami]."

She shows a photograph of her brother when he was alive and the photograph of the corpse. There is a resemblance.

While some say it is possibly worse to find a relative in near unrecognisable state than not find him at all, Ms Bond says she needs to keep searching. "I've been looking at bodies since I arrived. In every area that was devastated they were setting up a body area and I looked at every body.

"I write every day to my friends and family and it's perverse, but you pray for a body.

" I know they're dead, I just want to take them away and bury them."

Ms Bond is sure Janjira is also dead.

"We imagine she may be still under the ground."

When they find him, Mr Bond will be buried in Thailand.