Recently, I received this e-mail from my Swedish-Thai friend, Nouna. She is very distressed over the loss of life among Swedish tourists from this terrible Tsunami disaster. I thought I would share a few parts of her e-mail here, as it sheds a bit of light on the Swedish response to the disaster:

So far the official numbers in Sweden is that 44 are dead, most likely there will be a few hundred dead, perhaps even over 1000. The mainstream media has calculated that 1500 Swedes are missing, but that’s just numbers who went by charter. Now, after calculating travellers who just bought seats, the number is 4000. Naturally these are very broad numbers.

The government has received lots of criticism for not sending out planes etc fast enough. Expert teams have been sent to identify dead people. For Sweden this is seen as bigger than the Estonia (ship) sinking ten years ago. This is pretty much our Sep 11 as everyone seems to know someone who was in the area at the time. Schools and communities are preparing crisis handling for when people arrive home, or are reported to be dead/still missing.