After the Tsunami: Traveling with Scientology Volunteer Ministers in South East Asia

Danish photographer and feature writer, Thorsten Overgaard, traveled 12,000 miles throughout South East Asia after the tsunami, a virtual fly-on-the-wall, documenting the day-to-day lives of the Scientology Tsunami Relief Team Volunteers. After The Tsunami presents in detail a behind-the-scenes look at relief work when everyday western people - from a real estate agent from Germany to a student from Los Angeles - leave behind families, studies, careers and businesses to help strangers in crisis, whom they only know from media reports.

"It is a heartwarming story of the spiritual bonds between religions, ordinary western world people engaged in dangerous but important work that will change their lives forever, and daily miracles. It is a story in pictures that is in sharp contrast to the seemingly endless pictures of overwhelming devastation that played again and again on televised newscasts and on the front pages of the world for weeks and months. It is a story that brings hope to the world and shows how ordinary people can make a difference - that something can be done about it."

"When the tsunami crashed into the coast of Sri Lanka on the morning of December 26th [2004], over 30,000 people were killed and 1 million people became homeless in one stroke. Despite the unprecedented death and destruction along the coastal areas, a major portion of Sri Lanka's critical infrastructure remained intact, allowing government and rescue workers to head off further catastrophe from widespread starvation and disease."

Overgaard describes what motivated him to interrupt a thriving career and travel to the disaster zone, taking on this project: "'The wrong thing to do is nothing', a quote from L. Ron Hubbard that resonates as a profound truth for me and how I think and how I work. My two biggest regrets in this life were (and are) that I didn't drive to Berlin the night the Berlin Wall fell and that I didn't go to New York after September 11. In both cases I had a strong urge to go, but something in me said, 'be sensible'. That was wrong. We all carry an urge in us to reach out and do something as well as a voice urging us to be sensible and behave as if everything wrong is somebody else's problem. In the instance of the tsunami in South East Asia my urge to reach out and help conquered all my fears of strange diseases, pictures in my mind of dead bodies floating in a sea of chaos and a generally low knowledge about Asia and the people living there."

The tsunami relief effort was not only the largest mobilization of Scientology Volunteer Ministers to that date, it was also the most diverse. And it served as the inspiration for Volunteer Ministers from around the world from that point forward to join the relief efforts for such disasters as Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, the Pakistan Earthquake of 2005, the Java earthquake in 2006 and dozens of other minor and major disasters all over the world.

Overgaard's book is available on his website, also as a free ebook, at http://www.afterthetsunami.org

To find out more about the work and training of Scientology Volunteer Ministers: http://www.volunteerministers.org

News about the Scientology Volunteer Ministers: http://scientologytoday.org