Me

to do something. So we invited her to join us as well, and that’s how we ended up accompanied by cameramen from one of the most-watched television shows in the world. It was hard to imagine a more perfect alliance. We had not yet arrived, but we knew we were definitely going to make some noise!
    We departed on a plane from San Juan to New York, to then fly from New York to London, and onward from London to Bangkok. While we were on the flight from New York to London, with the press and cameras on the plane with us, we still had no itinerary. The trip came to be so suddenly that we didn’t even have time to plan what we were going to do. The way things were going, we were going to land in Bangkok and have to tell everyone, “Please just wait here while we rent a car....” I talk about it now and it makes me laugh, but at that moment our minds were racing because we had no detailed plan of what we were going to do, which isn’t at all how I was used to working, and surely Oprah’s team wasn’t, either. But this was a mission that came directly from the heart, and in the midst of the chaos I constantly kept repeating, in the form of a mantra, “Everything will be okay. Everything will be okay.”
    While we were in New York, the executive director of the foundation had been on the phone with the Thai embassy in Washington, D.C., telling them that Ricky Martin was en route to their country and wanted to help in whatever way possible. I was taking the activists’ advice to not be afraid to use my name for a cause I believed in.
    We arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport, and my executive director again contacted the Thai embassy in Washington, and learned that the ambassador was extremely happy that we wanted to help and offered his full support. Once again, the planets aligned so that everything would flow magically. Or maybe it’s just that the power of the mind is amazing. In those hours of total stress, my mantra helped a lot—that, I don’t doubt for a second.
    By the time we arrived in Bangkok, everything was resolved. We were picked up at the airport and we had a meeting with the prime minister, where we were briefed on what had taken place, and how the situation was being handled. Then they took us to the areas that had been most affected by the tsunami.
    It was incredible. The earthquake that caused the tsunami shook the streets on the island of Phuket at 7:58 a.m., local time, toppling over pedestrians and motorcycle riders and causing drivers to lose control of their cars. The magnitude of the earthquake, 9.1 on the Richter scale, is considered the third highest since the existence of the seismograph; it was so strong it made the entire planet tremble and move from its axis almost one degree. The principal epicenter was almost five hundred kilometers from Phuket, west of Sumatra, at the bottom of the ocean. (The largest magnitude that has ever been registered was during the Great Earthquake of Chile in 1960, also known as the Valdivia earthquake, which caused a tsunami that devastated Hilo, Hawaii, more than ten thousand kilometers from the epicenter.)
    The first tremor lasted for more than eight minutes. When it was over, the worst was still to come. Approximately an hour and a half after the earthquake, the people who were on the beaches of Phuket noticed that the ocean began to quickly recede. Some went to investigate and to pick up some of the fish that were left stranded on dry land with the sudden retreat of the water. Those who were on Mai Khao beach on the north of the island were very lucky, because a ten-year-old British girl had studied tsunamis in a geography class in elementary school and recognized the signs of an imminent tsunami. She explained it to her parents and the family alerted everyone else on the beach, and all of them were able to escape. Not far from there, a Scottish teacher also recognized the signs of what was coming and was able to take a bus full of tourists and local residents to safety.
    Unfortunately, the same thing did not occur in other areas. Many went out to investigate, or stayed in place calmly without even realizing what was happening. The first swell came minutes later, and the impact hurled boats and cars into the air, destroyed homes, and ripped trees out of the ground.
    The second wave came thirty minutes later, and thirty minutes after that came the strongest one of all, which was estimated at almost one hundred feet tall. That one turned the streets