A photo on Facebook shows the coach with some of the young footballers
Saturday was Pheeraphat's 16th birthday & # 39; Night & # 39; Sompiengjai, and a local store said the boys spent more than 700 baht ($ 22) to buy food, a large sum in this region.
Coach Nop describes Ek as being very kind and dedicated to boys. He thinks the boys have persuaded him to go with them to the caves. The caves are well known in the area and had already been explored by boys.
The best guess is that they went quite deep, which is easy when they are dry, were caught by the rising flood, and were forced to go even further.
What type of communication do children have with their parents? why are not they allowed to see them?
The official explanation is that they are weak in their test and potentially vulnerable to infection.
These are now very precious lives in Thailand. A massive effort was made to get them out alive. The Thai authorities do not take any chances.
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Can they also wanted to avoid seeing their parents again. Thais are generally less physical than westerners. Hugging is unusual.
And parents come from poor, marginalized communities, used to being told what to do by public servants, and probably grateful for the government's efforts to save them. They would not protest.
They were allowed to see them through the windows, and are gradually allowed to enter the same room, with gloves and face masks.
Will coach Ek face disciplinary proceedings?
unlikely. The parents say that they forgave him, and they are grateful for the efforts he would have made to keep their spirits in the caves, especially through meditation, which he learned for 12 years. years as a monk.
Meet the Thai boys who were trapped in a cave
How did the boys survive in hiding?
Coach Nop said that Ek could be called to become a monk for three months. a sort of penance, or to reconstitute or purify oneself spiritually.
Such a gesture would make a lot of sense to Thais, and he would probably be allowed to resume a normal life after that.
Thailand does not usually have a "blame culture" where a culprit must be found for any mishap. How did people survive so long with so little food and so little weight?
The boys were in the caves nine days before were found. They may have had some food from what they bought to celebrate the birthday of the night. They are passionate football players, very fit, and with the training they had a tight team.
It would have helped them to carefully ration their food and support each other, perhaps with songs.
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L & # 39; Ek coach teaches them to meditate, according to the Thai Navy divers, and gave them more food than he ate. He also told them to drink water dripping rocks, rather than polluted groundwater.
During their last six to eight days, they were fed, initially high protein gels, but later, more normal foods, which might have allowed them to start gaining some weight before going out
. dark all the time?
Most of the time. They went with cheap torches, which would not have lasted long. It is likely that they were in the dark for most of the first nine days of their ordeal.
Once they were found a Thai army doctor and at least three divers stayed with them, equipped with good torches. Even so, they were mostly in the dark, and had to wear sunglasses when they were out for the first time.
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Image Caption
Letters from their parents to help them cope
Have they been sedated?
The Thai authorities are very shy about this.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said that they had been slightly sedated. But the BBC has spoken to a number of people involved in the operation who say that boys were heavily sedated, and only semi-conscious.
The logic for this would be the fear that their rescuers would panic when they wore diving gear for the first time in the dark and in the water swirling caves, putting endanger the lives of all.
John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, who conducted the rescue operation, reportedly asked Australian Richard Harris, a diver and anesthetist, to help prepare the boys.
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How they carried semi-conscious or very sleepy boys through the technically difficult first steps of the trip, with lots of diving in passages, we do not know.
Sometimes they may have been tied to the body of a diver. Later they were tied on a stretcher and suspended to a rope pulley system attached to the cave roof.
The whole operation was complex, innovative and very daring. Nothing like it has been tried before. Some of the participants described the tasks performed by the basic divers, who carried the boys, as superhuman.
Who paid for this operation?
The Thai government, for the most part.
It is likely that the contribution of other countries, like the 30 members of the US Air Force who went to help, would have been funded by their own governments as a sign of goodwill .
Many Thai companies supported transportation and food. Thai Airways and Bangkok Airways offered free flights to some of the foreign divers arriving.
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does this alone?
No, and few countries could do it. Underwater diving is a very specialized skill, and expert rescuers are even rarer.
Thailand was fortunate that an experienced cave, Vern Unsworth, had extensively explored the Tham Luang cave complex and lived nearby.
He was on the scene the day after the boys disappeared and suggested that the Thai government should invite expert divers from other countries to help.
The Rescuers of the Thai Cave
The Thai Navy divers who descended first had difficulty, as their experience and equipment were for scuba diving, which is very different . They were chased from the caves by the rapidly rising floodwater, and finding the boys seemed a desperate cause.
Once foreign divers arrived from different countries, the Thai authorities allowed them to first design the search and then extremely complex rescue. It was a huge logistical operation involving hundreds of people, building rope and guide pulley systems, putting up energy and communication cables.
It is to Thailand's credit that this organization was so well organized and that there was no attempt to diminish the foreign contribution.
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