Her mission in life now is her Happy Hearts Fund, a charity she set up the year after the tsunami to help rebuild schools in areas hit by catastrophe. Her goal was to open 100 new schools by the 10th anniversary. It has just reached 107, in nine countries from Asia to South America.
Her life has been changed in so many ways by that day. Indeed, between globe-trotting trips for charity and work, she has lived for the past two years in Haiti, probably the only international model to choose Port-au-Prince as a base. She first visited to help build schools with the Happy Hearts Fund, falling in love with the country and then with her boyfriend Laurent Lamothe, a politician who has just resigned as prime minister.
But the fiance she lost to the tsunami is still very much part of her life. "My time with Simon was wonderful," she said, "and helped shape who I am."
Surfer: I just had to hold on to survive
As a surfer, Ian Cohen has always felt communion with the water.
Witnessing the destructive power of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami changed that forever.
On that fateful morning he was a lone man on a beach, in his surfwear, head bowed, waxing his board.
The then NSW Greens MP was feeling wrung out from politics and had travelled to the tranquil fishing town of Hikkaduwa on Sri Lanka's southwest coast.
A surf would iron out the kinks, he thought, as he looked up at the Indian Ocean. It was a terrible sight. The tides had vanished, sucked back for kilometres by an unseen force. In the distance a dark, seething mass rose, first five, then six metres high.
On land, Cohen scrambled up a coconut tree and latched on as the weight of water crashed around him. "I was just riding the wave, just focused on surviving," he recalls. "Just thinking is this going to stop, when is this going to stop?" He edged his way higher as the water smashed past him at chest height, carrying concrete and wooden shards. "My surfing instincts just came to the fore and I knew I had protect myself from the debris.
"I just had to hold on to survive."
A marketplace just a few hundred metres away was wiped out.
A train he was meant to catch was skittled off the rails. "The windows were barred on that train ... hundreds drowned inside."
He stayed on a month to help clean up the chaos, working to rebuild a disability centre in Galle where those who survived did so by floating to the ceiling on wooden beds and foam mattresses.
- AAP, Daily Telegraph Group
