Former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, leaders of the American effort to help survivors of the Dec. 26 tsunami, visited a devastated Thai fishing village Saturday as they began a tour to promote reconstruction efforts. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, meanwhile, toured the hardest-hit area, Indonesia's Aceh province, to assess recovery efforts. About a third of the 320,000 residents of Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, are dead or missing. "We hope to learn some more about what else we could" to help relief efforts, Clinton told several hundred people in Ban Nam Khem village. About 2,000 people died in the area _ more than one-third of the 5,395 confirmed dead in Thailand from the earthquake-triggered giant waves. Several thousand others are listed as missing. Clinton and Bush _ father of the current U.S. president _ were given drawings by children who lost family members in the disaster. One showed a giant wave with rescue helicopters flying overhead. Overall, more than 169,000 were killed across southern Asia and eastern Africa, and thousands more remain missing. On Sunday, Clinton and Bush are to travel to Indonesia's Aceh province, near the epicenter of Dec. 26's magnitude-9.0 quake. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited a makeshift classroom in a tent in Banda Aceh, telling students to be patient and keep studying hard because they are the nation's future. "I ask you all to be patient during the disaster. Keep praying, study a lot, because behind every disaster there is a blessing," he said. On Friday, U.N. officials said about 790,000 tsunami survivors in Aceh are still unable to feed themselves and will need food rations for many more months. The disaster is also expected to cost the region's battered fishing industry a half billion dollars (¤382 million) in losses, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said.
