Soccer helps tsunami victims to forget

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Lot Thompson has a black eye and gash across his temple, but his passion for soccer drives him to finish the tsunami recovery series.
The 20-year-old has much deeper wounds.
Half the Thompson family were killed in last year's tsunami which ravaged India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands.
Soccer, says the stocky Thompson sporting four stitches from his injury, provides a brief escape.
"I'm trying to forget all that," he says, recalling how he ran into the jungle and climbed a coconut tree to escape the giant waves that lashed the archipelago off India's eastern coast.
"I lost 13 members of my family, including my mother and sister. We were 26 members in the family. Now we have been reduced to half. We haven't even recovered their bodies."
Thompson was a member of an 18-man squad from the tiny island which toured the Indian mainland this month to play a series of matches against prominent local teams.
The soccer tour was organised by the Sports Authority of India (SAI), a top state-run sports agency, to help in dealing with post-tsunami trauma.

SOCIALLY STRONGER
"We have a social stake in Car Nicobar which has a very old tradition of soccer," says SAI secretary B.K. Sinha. "We decided to use sport as a means to make them socially and psychologically stronger."
Most of the squad were leaving their sleepy island of swaying coconut plantations for the first time.
"Many of them have lost family members, we have kind of adopted them," he says. "We're also taking them for sightseeing in all the big cities to help them forget the tragedy."
Daniel John, a 19-year-old teammate of Thompson, says he is still struggling to get over the horrors of Dec. 26 which began with an undersea earthquake a few hundred miles south of Car Nicobar and triggered the tsunami.
"I was also swept away when the waves hit, but I clung on to a log and somehow survived," says John, displaying scars on his elbow and foot suffered during his fight for survival.
Officials say the tsunami killed 850 people on Car Nicobar, which had a population of 19,000 before the disaster. Privately though, they admit the toll may have been much higher.
India is highly protective of tribal groups in the archipelago, some of whom continue to remain hunters and gatherers, and has strict rules in place that limit the influence of outsiders in the area.
Some outside influences crept in though. Soccer, which came to Car Nicobar in the early part of the 20th century, is hugely popular.
Most of the island's 15 grounds were damaged by the tsunami and a sports hostel run by the SAI was reduced to rubble.
SAI officials say the Nicobarese are as keen to repair their damaged grounds as their own homes.
"When we met the big chief in Car Nicobar in April and asked him what we could do, the first thing he wanted was to rebuild the damaged main stadium," says SAI director-general Ratan Watal.
The post-tsunami soccer team's tour has received a lot of media attention on the mainland and the players say they hope it will serve to highlight their resource problems back home.

SAI officials have vowed to help.
"They were drowning, but they are now floating," Sinha says. "We want them to swim."