Tsunami - 10 weeks on: The pride of making a difference in disaster zone

Doctors walk through ice which helps to preserve the bodies. Picture / Brett Phibbs

The New Zealand flag hardly moves in the zephyr as the Kiwi forensic team eat sandwiches in 47C heat.

Their outdoor lunchroom is a short walk from a makeshift mortuary at a Buddhist temple in Phang Nga Province, which has been taken over by international forensics teams.

The New Zealanders have stripped off boiling white protective suits for a well-earned break from the morning's gruesome work of helping to identify hundreds of bodies of tsunami victims.

It is a job most people would not be able to contemplate but which they do willingly and with pride.

This is Rotation Four - a pathologist, a forensic dentist, a fingerprint expert and various police officers.

Each rotation of New Zealanders spends three weeks here - it is long enough, they say - then is replaced by the next group of volunteers.

When Rotation Four arrived at their hotel, Rotation Three greeted them with a haka.

Rotation Three knew exactly what the new team were in for and were showing utmost respect.

At the temple, known as Site I, the bodies have been lying for more than two months.

Thousands of them were retrieved in and around the devastated Khao Lak area.

The first New Zealand team encountered the chaos of the temple then. Bodies lay on every available space. The smell was so bad it clung to hair and clothes and grasped at the back of the throat.

The temple was a throng of relatives looking for bodies, international media teams, officials, Thai civilian helpers and foreign tsunami survivors, all volunteering. In the middle of it all were stray dogs and chickens.

The chickens are still there - one laid an egg in the Australian lunchroom - but it is a much calmer place and more orderly.

The relatives and the media have all but gone and the bodies - nearly 600 here and a further 500 stored at a nearby site - are zipped up in body bags in refrigerated containers awaiting examination for clues as to who they were.

They are taken out and thawed in the sun, then wheeled on hospital trolleys into the morgue area.

The foreigners have been transferred to a new, streamlined, purpose-built morgue near the airport in Phuket and the bodies left at Site I are supposed to be Thai.

But New Zealand forensic dentist Bruce Murdoch indicates a body he has been working on which he believes is a European.

"Nice to meet you, just pop in," Murdoch had said before lunch.

The oral maxillofacial surgeon, who has done a lot of forensic work for the police, made cheery introductions to other forensic dentists, these ones from Holland, also working on bodies. Written on the wall is where they are from: "Neder Zealand."

"We examine the teeth," Murdoch says. "The jaws are almost falling out due to the decay and things. Here we have six lower anterior teeth and a denture space so we can tell this woman was probably in her fifties.

"We take radiographs or x-rays of the teeth and we can match those up with the ante-mortem records. We can also look for characteristics in the bite. This woman would have had a denture but it's gone. Sometimes dentures have identification marks in them.

"We've picked up three Europeans in the last two days, we think, from their filling work."

It is anything but pleasant but what sustains Murdoch and the others is the fact that bodies are finally being identified.

"We're getting these people home. That's what we're here for, to get them home. If we can get them back to their families that makes it all worthwhile."

More than 700 bodies have been identified now, about 95 per cent of them from teeth.

Next we meet Tom Coyle, the 37-year-old fingerprint expert with the New Zealanders.

The Thais have asked him to come to the temple to verify by fingerprints some of their identifications.

Thai people are fingerprinted at aged 16 and Coyle takes fingerprints from the corpses and sees what matches can be made.

He copes with the fact that he is working on a person with the thought "that person's not there any more".

"You're working there for a result and a result only and you don't think of it as an actual person. You're there to do a job and you're so focused that everything around you doesn't matter. That's the way you get through."

You might think forensic pathologist Dr Simon Stables is a sucker for punishment. It is his second rotation at the temple; he was also on the first team of volunteers.

He came back because at the end of his first tour only eight bodies had been identified. He knew then how much more work there was to do and volunteered again before getting on the plane to leave.

He measures height and sex, tries to identify hair colour, and looks for tattoos or scars.

He performs limited internal examinations looking for the spleen, the appendix, the gall bladder and, in women, the uterus and looks for any injury marks.

The day before, a body was found with a jacket and trousers which fitted the description of an employee of one of the resorts.

But the identification of New Zealand woman Belinda Welch by a member of a Swedish team was a real result for the group.

"Everybody was rapt. I think it was just sort of quiet joy really, a sense of satisfaction. You know, it's good to have one go home."

Stables, usually based at Auckland City Hospital, says he has been changed by what he has seen.

On the first trip the sight of so many bodies lying about everywhere was "mindblowing".

"I've never seen anything like that. Bewildered is not the right word. Stunned is a good way to describe it. You think, where do you start?"

No one could walk away from here unaffected, he said.

"You go up the coast and you can see how everything's wiped out, how people's lives have been changed within the mere space of half an hour.

"You go back home and you think, no, things you [once] viewed as being important are perhaps not so important any more."

Other nations praise New Zealand for boxing above its weight in this work. Compared to the numbers of dead from many other countries, four probable New Zealand deaths may not warrant such commitment.

But the forensic team all stress how important the work is, even if only as a learning exercise. A large-scale catastrophe, they say, could easily happen back home one day.