| Tiffany Crawford | |
| Canadian Press |
VANCOUVER (CP) - Tyler Leinweber kayaked headlong into the belly of a hostile tsunami wave to save a Thai boatman.
He is being hailed as a hero, but all Leinweber wants is to come home.
But the 29-year-old from Kelowna, B.C., is one of countless others working in Thailand and other South Asian countries hit by the castastrophe who can't get back to Canada because of red tape and chaos.
The dive instructor has been living in Thailand for seven years. He speaks fluent Thai.
He has a Thai wife named Ya and a bright-eyed 14-month-old son, MacDonald.
He ran a dive shop on Ray Leh Beach in Krabi which was flattened Boxing Day when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake rattled the earth.
The business was completely destroyed by the killer tsunami waves.
Leinweber made headlines in local newspapers last week after a Canadian tourist, James Drummond wrote home to his mother about "a very brave couple who took a sea-kayak out into the bay to try and rescue people."
Instead of running for their lives, Leinweber and a friend paddled out to save a trapped boatman. As the grabbed hold of the man their boats were smashed by the churning wave. All three survived by clinging to the shattered remains of a pier.
"I don't know how we got through it," said Leinweber.
Now he's desperate to bring his family back to Canada as fears mount about a sanitation crisis in the area and the impending threat of disease.
"There is nothing for us here," he said Saturday in a phone interview from his home in Ao Nang, Thailand.
"The dive shop is gone, our friends are missing, Phuket is gone, Krabi is gone, Phi Phi Island is gone, so much we love is all gone."
Leinweber said with all the confusion he can't get visas for his wife and baby and Foreign Affairs isn't doing much to help.
"I can't get through to the consulate in Ottawa which is who I need to deal with. It's almost impossible."
His friend, Tyler Mervyn in Kelowna, B.C., said Friday he booked them all a flight home but Leinweber's son and wife can't leave Bangkok without the proper papers.
Immigration Canada is pledging to fast track immigration requests for those victims who have relatives in Canada.
"It's a case by case situation," said Maria Iadinardi, a spokeswoman for Immigration.
"Our main priority is to reunite the immediate family members. They're going to be processed ASAP."
She agreed some cases may be rushed through in 24 hours, depending on the severity of the situation.
It's likely the largest number of fast tracked immigrants will come from Sri Lanka because there are so many Canadians of Sri Lankan descent.
Yoga Yogendran, president of the B.C. Sri Lanka Friendship Association, is worried the victims won't get word of Ottawa's promise to help bring them to safety.
"People in major centres might get to know about it and some there will exploit it but the hardest hit, those in remote areas won't be able to do anything," he said.
Yogendran planned to send out a newsletter to members of the association urging them to contact family members in remote areas to tell them about Ottawa's announcement.
Leinweber wants to know why Foreign Affairs can't fast track visas for the spouses and children of Canadians who want to go home.
It may be the organization is far too swamped trying to identify the missing or dead Canadians to deal with the additional paperwork.
Foreign Affairs did not return calls.
More than 125,000 people are dead in South Asia and 150 Canadians were listed missing as of Sunday.
Foreign Affairs came under fire last week for not providing enough help for Canadians abroad.
On Thursday Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said the fact information is being compiled by different agencies has made it hard to pin down the numbers of missing.
Iadinardi said Thai officials are working with Foreign Affairs to get visas to Canadians' spouses and children. But Leinweber said the Thai government is doing nothing and he wants more assistance from Ottawa.
He has contacted the consular offices in Phuket and in Bangkok and said both told him to go through Ottawa. But he cannot reach anyone by telephone.
"You call Phuket, they tell you to call Bangkok, you call Bangkok, no you have to call Ottawa but they don't tell you anything," he said.
"It's extremely bad."
Leinweber says his dive shop has been wiped out and the threat of disease, the endless stench of bloated corpses, and the lack of aid - food, water, and medicine - in his fairly remote village has left him sleepless with worry about his young family.
"There's not much aid where we are. I hear the choppers when I go to sleep and I hear them when I wake up but there's no help here. They go to the major centres," he said.
"I don't want my son to get sick."
But Leinweber said he can't complain because he knows how lucky he is that he and his family and his wife's extended family all miraculously survived.
At the height of the storm, Leinweber and his friend Troy Pyett of Nelson, B.C., charged through a six metre wave in a small wooden boat with a paddle when they should have been fleeing to higher ground.
"We watched - people were being sucked into the sea and then it looked like it went calm and we saw wreckage, dive vessels capsized smashed on the rocks," he said.
All three survived by clinging to the shattered remains of a pier. Back on shore the two B.C. men were greeted with cheers for their heroic feat.
"Thinking back now it was more foolish than heroic. It was a spur of the moment thing," said Leinweber.
"Another reason why I did it was I know that Thai people are bad swimmers at the best of times. They live near the sea yet they cannot swim and I think that's why there has been so many of them lost."