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The enormous death and destruction all around us only leaves me in amazement that we all survived. Our house was right on the ocean, but the coral reef a hundred feet in front of it and the seawall probably bought my sisters and their children maybe 30 lifesaving seconds to flee. That morning, all the children were at the back of our neighbors’ house, watching their elephants being washed, instead of playing on the beach. Their heroic staff managed to save the children from the initial wave and prevent them from being dragged out to sea or crushed by collapsing walls. Most of the kids were subsequently swept inland and miraculously placed on the roofs of small houses by locals although relatively few of the locals could swim, and sadly drowned), or they somehow managed to cling to trees, or were actually pulled from beneath the water by frantic parents or kind strangers. It took up to an hour for my sisters and their neighbors to locate all of their children–an unimaginably harrowing time.