Johan Frijns / International Rivers

A July 23 visit to the site of the proposed Xayaburi Dam has revealed that construction on the dam’s access road and work camp is forging ahead despite an agreement by the four lower Mekong countries to defer a decision on the project earlier this year.

Conservationists say work on a controversial hydropower dam on the Mekong River is underway in Laos even though that Southeast Asian nation had deferred a decision on whether the project should go ahead in face of strong opposition from neighboring countries earlier this year.

Construction on the Xayaburi Dam's access road and work camp is moving ahead, International Rivers, which campaigns to protect rivers, said in a statement about a visit to the site made on July 23 by a researcher unaffiliated with their group who wished to remain anonymous. Some land has been cleared, but the owners had not received compensation, International Rivers said.

The Bangkok Post on Sunday reported that their correspondents in early April had "found major road works under construction" in the area surrounding the proposed dam and "villagers preparing to be relocated" — with some told they would get about $15 in compensation. International Rivers believe the work in late July was a continuation of that process, said Aviva Imhof, the California-based group's campaigns director.

"By building this dam, Laos is disregarding its regional commitments and robbing the future of millions of people in the region who rely upon the river for their livelihood and food security," said Ame Trandem, Southeast Asia program director for International Rivers. 

The dam — the first of 11 proposed in the waterway's lower basin — would generate 1,260 megawatts of electricity, mostly for export to Thailand, according to the Mekong River Commission (MRC) — created by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in 1995 to oversee sustainable development along the waterway.

Laos proposed building the dam in September 2010, the main goal being to generate "foreign exchange earnings for financing socio-economic development in Lao PDR," according to the river commission.

Under earlier agreements, Laos has the right to proceed on its own without approval of the other three nations. But Laos' choice in late April to defer a decision appeared to indicate that the desperately poor country wants its neighbors' support, especially that of Vietnam, which is a major trading partner and political patron.

Conservationists warn that the dam could significantly reduce the critical fish stock in the Mekong, the world's most productive inland fishery.

The 3,000-mile river, which winds from China's Tibetan Plateau through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, is home to nearly 1,000 freshwater fish species — including more species of giant fish, such as the Mekong giant catfish and the dog-eating catfish, than any other river. It provides a total harvest of about 2.5 million metric tons a year worth up to $6.5 billion, according to fish biologist Zeb Hogan, a research professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has studied the river for 15 years.

See a slideshow on life along the Mekong River

About two-thirds of the population of the lower Mekong Basin — or 40 million people — are involved in the Mekong's fishery at least part-time or seasonally, the MRC said.

At the MRC meeting in late April, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam raised concerns about "gaps in technical knowledge and studies about the project, predicted impact on the environment and livelihoods of people in the Mekong Basin and the need for more public consultations," the commission said in a statement.

Vietnam proposed that this project — and other hydropower projects planned for the Mekong mainstream — be delayed for at least 10 years.

“The deferment should be positively seen as a way to provide much-needed time for riparian governments to carry out comprehensive and more specific quantitative studies on all possible cumulative impacts,” Le Duc Trung, head of Vietnam's delegation, said in the MRC statement. 

Laos disagreed, saying it was not practical to extend the process and argued that the dam would not have a negative environmental impact on its neighbors.

The four countries were to meet in Phnom Penh on Friday to discuss the next steps in the decision-making process for the dam, but the meeting was postponed indefinitely on Tuesday, International Rivers said. 

The Laos-based MRC did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the ongoing construction and the postponed meeting was not immediately responded to. In late June, an MRC spokesman, Surasak Glahan, said that Laos had engaged consultants to conduct studies to address concerns raised by Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand about the dam.

Ed Ou / Redux Pictures

Photojournalists Guy Martin, left, and Dominic Nahr, right, take cover behind a wall as anti- and pro-government protesters throw stones during a clash near Tahrir Square in Cairo on Feb. 3. Martin was seriously wounded in Misrata, Libya, on Wednesday.

Surgeon Ahmed Radwan was finishing an operation in a Libyan city under siege by Gadhafi forces on Wednesday when he got the call: A man with massive bleeding needed his help.

The patient was Guy Martin, a British photographer affiliated with the Panos photo agency. He had been hit by shrapnel and had two main injuries: one to his bowel and major trauma to the arteries and veins in his pelvis. The surgery at the private hospital lasted six hours, said Radwan, a 35-year-old vascular surgeon from Cairo who is volunteering with the Arab Medical Union.

"The major vessels of the left (lower) limb usually come from the pelvis and go through the limb – those were totally cut. We ligated some of them to control the bleeding, because he was bleeding too much," he said in a Skype interview with msnbc.com. "We just reconstructed the major and the important ones with (synthetic) grafts."

"The bleeding was controlled," he said, noting that Martin was in the intensive care unit. "He's doing fine. He's going to make it, inshallah."

Martin can be evacuated, but he is not fit for a long trip, Radwan said. "He cannot stay in a car for a long time ... he will suffer a lot of pain. Still he needs fluids and IV lines to be connected to him," the surgeon said.

Martin was with British-born Tim Hetherington, the Oscar-nominated co-director of the documentary "Restrepo" about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; Chris Hondros, a New York-based photographer for Getty Images; and American photographer Michael Christopher Brown on Wednesday when they were caught in an explosion. Hetherington and Hondros died from their injuries.

The Washington Post reported that the group had gone with rebel fighters to Tripoli Street in the center of Misrata, scene of the some of the most intense recent fighting in the city. Many circumstances of the incident were unclear, The Associated Press reported. A statement from Hetherington's family said he was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Radwan said he also saw – but did not treat – Brown.

"His function is good. ... I saw him visiting Guy. He was talking to him, checking on him to see that he was OK," Radwan said. "I didn't get a chance to talk to him a lot. ... He was not feeling good because of (what happened to) his friends."

The coastal city of Misrata lies on a road linking the capital, Tripoli, a Gadhafi stronghold, to the key oil town of Sirte in the east. It has been difficult for Western journalists to access the city because of weeks of heavy fighting.

Libyan-American describes harrowing escape from Misrata

No one can say how many people have been killed as Gadhafi’s forces have moved against the city. Medical facilities have tallied 257 people killed and 949 wounded – including 22 women and eight children – since Feb. 19, Human Rights Watch reported last week.

Misrata's opposition media committee reported late Thursday that Tripoli Street had been taken by the rebel fighters, a key breakthrough in ridding the area of Gadhafi snipers. A spokesman reported five deaths and 27 injuries, though it was not clear if those were of opposition fighters or Gadhafi forces.

"There are a lot of losses," said Radwan, who has been in Misrata for 15 days. "The price of this achievement is a lot of dead bodies, and a lot of blood."

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Courtesy of Shelley Fredrickson

Montgomery "Monty" Dickson, 26, "loved it there in Japan. He loved the students and he loved all the culture," says his sister, Shelley Fredrickson.

The body of a popular American teacher known as "Monty-san" has been found in the tiny coastal Japanese town where he worked, more than three weeks after the country was rocked by a powerful earthquake and devastating tsunami, his sister said Wednesday.

“We’ve got a big hole in our universe here,” said Shelley Fredrickson, a 44-year-old sales representative from Anchorage, Alaska, adding that the family was not accepting the confirmation of the death of her brother, Montgomery Dickson, officially until they travel to Japan, "for our own peace of mind."

The family received an email from the U.S. Consulate in Japan on Monday saying that police had recovered his body in the town of Rikuzentakata, said Gloria Shriver, Fredrickson's mother-in-law. Dickson's girlfriend, Naoko, then went to Rikuzentakata and identified his body.

The family knows little about the circumstances of Dickson's death. The last one to speak to the 26-year-old known as Monty was Naoko, whom he called after his students had evacuated from the school where he was teaching. Following evacuation procedure, Dickson -- a teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) -- then headed to the Board of Education office on the third floor at City Hall, which was believed to be a safe haven. Instead, it was overrun by the tsunami generated by the powerful earthquake that struck offshore.

"They said his body was found a full kilometer away from the building ... and it was lucky that they found him," said Fredrickson. "Out of the 25 people that were at the Board of Education office, only five of them survived, and out of the 20 that were missing, only three of them were found so far.

"My intention is always to bring him home, regardless -- I need to bring him home."

Dickson is the second American confirmed by the U.S. State Department to have died in the disaster in Japan, out of 12,554 confirmed deaths. The other American fatality, 24-year-old Taylor Anderson of Richmond, Va., also was a JET teacher.

Rikuzentakata was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami. An International Medical Corps team that visited soon afterward said it “was completely destroyed by the tsunami and no persons were present. Showing the depth of the tsunami wave and extent of the destruction, water marks were observed at a height of up to 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) on the sides of hills."

Fredrickson said she and other relatives plan to travel to Japan to claim his body and return it to his native Alaska.

"The Japanese they want to hurry up and cremate and get moving forward," she said. "I don't want to just receive a box of ashes at the airport. What closure do I have that this is my brother? We want to be a part of the process, I suppose, and have our own confirmation, our own closure ... and know that we're accompanying him home."

Dickson, whose parents died at different times when he was a child, lived with Fredrickson in his late teens. She said he always worked hard in school to make his mother proud, excelling in academics, and continued to strive for academic achievement after her death -- finishing among the top of his class in high school and at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he received a bachelor's degree in language with an emphasis in Japanese.

The search had been a full-time operation for the family, and they were only able to plan usually a day ahead, Fredrickson said. They had family in England and Hawaii helping to post word online about his disappearance, and they had been in touch with several U.S. agencies and Japanese authorities about the search.

“He loved it there in Japan. He loved the students and he loved all the culture … He always called me or wrote through emails the joy he had of living there, and I know it was a place he wanted to be. I know he lived the life that he wanted,” she said. But, “he had a lot of goals still left to fulfill and … (his life) was cut too short.”

Despite the lack of word from Dickson, who loved to compete in bike races, friends and family hadn't given up hope of finding him safe.

A hot dog vendor in Anchorage held a fundraiser on Monday -- the same day police phoned to say they had recovered his body -- called "Monty Monday," with proceeds going to support the search effort.

"It was so touching to have had that going on, waiting for confirmation," Fredrickson said, adding that she didn't even tell anyone that his body may have been located because she was hanging on to the last bit of hope. “I still didn’t want to believe it."

She said many of her brother's friends were posting messages on his Facebook page, to which their brother, Ian Dickson, was responding.

“We were all hoping that he'd be found on a mountain top, or shelter, or to simply come striding out of the rubble. This is not the case,” Dickson wrote, noting that he had been trying to find “words of solace.”

“I guess there is a peace in knowing this is part of the human condition. We all live, and we all die. If we are lucky we have a happy life. Monty's life was happy.”

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Alison Criado-Perez / MSF

A wounded Libyan is loaded onto a vessel bound for Tunisia on Sunday.
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Libyans in the besieged city of Misrata are suffering a host of horrors at the hands of forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi, including beatings, rapes, summary executions and worsening food and medicine shortages, a spokesman for the opposition said Tuesday.

More than 1,000 people have been killed or are presumed dead in Misrata since the conflict began in early February, and another 100 are listed as missing, said the spokesman, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. 

“The security situation remains grave, especially in particular areas where Gadhafi’s forces are still present -- whether in the form of heavy artillery tanks on the ground or in the form of groups of snipers positioned alongside some of the areas … very close to the city or in the suburbs,” he told msnbc.com via Skype from Libya’s third largest city. 

Opposition fighters managed to repel an advance by Gadhafi forces from the east on Saturday, with the help of bombardments from coalition aircraft. But part of a food supply depot at the city’s port went up in flames. Though residents are grateful for the coalition’s help, they wanted to know why it did not act sooner.

“People are starting to question how come the response of the international coalition is not being … timely enough, but also well spread enough across the city boundaries and within the city center itself … to just eliminate this kind of threat to the city and its population,” the spokesman said.

If Gadhafi’s forces had taken the port – where many civilians have taken refuge -- it “could have had disastrous implications for the people of Misrata,” he said.

msnbc.com

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said it evacuated 71 wounded people from the Misrata port on Sunday, including three on life support, 11 with major traumas and many others with abdominal wounds and open fractures. Intensive care was provided onboard until the boat reached Tunisia on Monday morning.

“We managed to dock at Misrata on Sunday afternoon, despite intense fighting in the city over the past few days,” Helmy Mekaoui, an MSF doctor who coordinated the medical evacuation, said in a statement. “The violence caused an influx of wounded people and it was fortunate we could be there and get them onboard.”

“There were burn victims, people with open fractures, and a variety of other injuries. Time was of the essence here, as we really needed to be back out in international waters before the sun went down,” said Annas Alamudi, a Doctors Without Borders logistician who participated in the emergency evacuation. “We got all the patients on board and were just about ready to depart when another group of patients arrived. It’s a good thing we were still there, as this group was the most critical. One man had an amputated leg and gunshot wounds; another man had a gunshot wound to the head.”

Alison Criado-Perez / Doctors Without Borders

Doctors tend to an injured Libyan evacuated from Mirata while sailing to Tunisia.

MSF said the hospital in Misrata reportedly came under bombardment early Sunday. Remaining clinics in the city were swamped with severely injured patients and were running desperately short of supplies.

The opposition spokesman said food shortages also were becoming common in the markets that are still operating. Fresh water is in short supply too, forcing people to rely “on really old methods in their water supply, whether digging wells or trying to just to operate old wells that have been abandoned for the last decade or so,” he said.

While the fighting remains a constant danger, residents are forced to take their lives into their hands in an effort to procure basic supplies, he said.

Schools were shuttered and few shops were open. People were trying to do their shopping between artillery barrages.

“There is no sign of back to normal life,” he said. “Everything is at a standstill in Misrata.”

Libyan officials deny attacking civilians in Misrata, saying they are fighting armed gangs linked to al Qaida, Reuters reported. The coalition has destroyed nearly one-third of Gadhafi's military since initiating air strikes last month, but NATO said it had to change bombing tactics because the Libyan forces were using civilians as human shields.

Misrata is now the priority for NATO air strikes, Reuters reported.

Amid the fighting, some of those abducted from Misrata by Gadhafi forces have been freed. One man, a farmer, reported being beaten with an electrical wire and being forced to chant “Gadhafi is God,” the opposition spokesman said. The farmer said an older man, a religious teacher, was summarily shot and killed for refusing to chant, while others, some of whom had opposition songs or images of the conflict in their cell phones -- were brutalized with cigarette burns and electric shocks, according to the spokesman. (As with nearly all reports from Misrata, the accounts could not be independently confirmed.)

The spokesman said there were known cases of gang-rape by Gadhafi mercenaries, including assaults on a married middle-aged woman and two sisters in their 20s.

“These are very, very sensitive issues for people to talk about in Libya generally, but in Misrata in particular … (it is) a very conservative society. People tend to not bring this up at all,” he said. “We’re pretty much sure that the large portion of the (rape) cases that took place are unreported because of this particular sensitivity.”

The spokesman said opposition forces were holding out hope that rebel fighters will reach Misrata soon, but they know a large battle looms first in Sirte, a major city to the east that is in control of Gadhafi loyalists. In the meantime, Misrata’s port was under heavy shelling and artillery fire once more on Tuesday, he said.

“The port area has always been a target by Gadhafi’s forces just to bring the city to its knees … just to make them starve,” he said. In addition, the Libyan army forces are attempting to completely encircle the city, “whereby we will surrender our lives to Gadhafi once again, which is basically something that will never happen as far as we are concerned.”

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A photo taken from a YouTube video said to show a patient in the hospital in Misrata, Libya, which is besieged by forces loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The battle in Libya has reached the doors of Dr. Aiman's clinic in Misrata: A man was killed in its entrance late Wednesday, he said, probably by fire from the tanks that have surrounded the hospital, though it could have been snipers loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.  

The snipers took up positions on tall buildings around the clinic Wednesday morning, posing a deadly threat to anyone coming in or out, said Aiman, who gave only one name out of concern for his safety.

"We came under attack from two tanks, heavy tanks, that bombed and shelled near the hospital," he told msnbc.com in a Skype call from the hospital in Libya's third-largest city.  "Two bombs fell 2, 3 meters away from the hospital. The situation is very, very bad. We have one person killed just in the entrance."

The most recent round of fighting in Misrata began two days ago, when residents went to a key square to protest against Gadhafi, said engineer Nadir Abuzeid, who is acting as a spokesman for the rebels. Gadhafi forces bombed the square "randomly," killing 21 and wounding 112, he said.

"This is one of the bloodiest days since the protests began February 17," Abuzeid said, speaking through a translator and referring to the date of the first anti-Gadhafi demonstrations in Libya.

The situation at the hospital has steadily deteriorated since, said Aiman. Doctors on Wednesday were treating more than 120 wounded, though the clinic has only 60 beds, he said.

"The injured people -- we stopped counting them, it's overcount. We're just counting the dead people," he said. "Now we are treating people on the floor, no beds. ... We have no empty place. Even our operating theater, we are operating on three patients at the same time. We are operating on trolleys, not on operating beds."

msnbc.com

He said doctors also were "using our flash mobile lights because we are working on a generator ... we don't have enough light."

The clinic no longer had anaesthesia, narcotics or sterilization. The patients were "crying from pain," he said. "We don't have anything we can do for them."

Misrata is located about 125 miles east of Tripoli, and is home to 300,000 people and iron, steel and textile factories, according to Libyaonline.com. Abuzeid said Gadhafi's forces appeared to be trying to establish a secure corridor along the road from Misrata to another strategic coastal city to the east: Sirte.

Gadhafi's forces were squeezing the southern part of Misrata, forcing residents to flee to the north. In the exodus, a man and his four children were killed by tank artillery on Tuesday, Abuzeid said.

"There is fear from this military action and more fear of the snipers ... The people are working together, they are feeding each other, they are helping each other," he said. "Everyone is a target."

Rear Adm. Gerard Hueber, a top U.S. officer in the military campaign in Libya, said international forces were attacking government troops that have been storming population centers in the country. On Wednesday evening, Libyan state television reported a "Crusader colonialist bombing targeting certain civil and military locations" in Tripoli's Tajoura district — scene of some of the heaviest past protests against Gadhafi.

"Libya has been dead for 42 years (since Gadhafi's rule began), so we consider ourselves dead," said Abuzeid. "It's an issue of freedom. We want to get rid of the tyranny."

It's not clear overall how many people have died or been wounded in the conflict in Misrata. But more than 85 people have been kidnapped, Abuzeid said. (Click to read previous article:Pro-Gadhafi kidnap gangs silencing foes.)

Though Hueber said the international coalition's targets included mechanized forces, mobile surface-to-air missile sites and lines of communications from Ajdabiya in the east to Misrata in the west, Aiman said his city remains blockaded.

"We are in an embargo from the west, from the south, from the east. Even our seaport (to the north), we cannot receive any help from" there, he said. "We have nothing."

Aiman said some people had been stuck in the hospital for 10 days because "it's not safe to go out or come into the hospital."

"If anyone goes out, maybe he cannot come back to the hospital ... (he) could be killed, could be kidnapped; maybe they don't have a safe way to get back to the hospital. We don't know about our families. There is no telecommunications, no landlines, nothing here. Everything is cut. The water, the electricity, no food. Nothing here in the city. It's a ghost city now."

Courtesy of Shelley Fredrickson

American teacher Monty Dickson, a teacher in the small Japanese coastal village of Rikuzentakata, has not been seen since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan.

Almost everyone in the town of Rikuzentakata on Japan’s northeast coast knew teacher Montgomery Dickson, or “Monty-san,” as the locals call him.

But the tall American hasn't been heard from since the March 11 quake and tsunami slammed the northeastern coast of the island nation, and any surviving villagers in the town of 23,000 who might have spotted his familiar face apparently have left. An International Medical Corps team that visited Rikuzentakata in the wake of the double disaster found it “was completely destroyed by the tsunami and no persons were present. Showing the depth of the tsunami wave and extent of the destruction, water marks were observed at a height of up to 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) on the sides of hills.”

But Dickson's family and friends are holding out hopes that Dickson, who competed in bike races and joked with his family in Alaska about knowing the area so well that he gave directions to the locals, somehow survived the carnage, said his sister, Shelley Fredrickson, a 44-year-old sales representative in Anchorage.

"We still have hope, we haven’t given up hope by any means of finding him,” she said.

The last one to speak to the 26-year-old Dickson, known as Monty, was his girlfriend, whom he called after his students had evacuated the school where he was teaching. Following evacuation procedure, Dickson -- a teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) -- then went to the board of education office on the third floor at City Hall as a safe haven.

“When the tsunami hit, all contact with him was gone," Fredrickson said. "We found out that the tsunami was much larger than anybody ever predicted. It went over the third floor of the building where he was. So, that news was very ... damaging to us as a family.”

Overall, some 13,800 people are still listed as missing in the quake and tsunami, in addition to more than 9,200 confirmed deaths, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. So far, Taylor Anderson, a 24-year-old JET teacher from Richmond, Va., is the only American known to have died in the tragedy, according to the U.S. State Department, which said it was looking into several other reports of missing Americans. 

Fredrickson said she and her brother have family in England and Hawaii who are helping to post word online about Dickson's disappearance, and they have been in touch with several U.S. agencies and Japanese authorities. She said U.S. consular officials went to the town last week to bring supplies and search -- checking shelters and the morgue –- but found no sign of him.

“You think that if he was walking around helping people -- everybody did know him and he does stand out -- that we would have heard word that somebody would have seen him,” she said. "We all put ourselves on Japanese time so that we can be awake when search crews were there."

His girlfriend also went to Rikuzentakata a few days ago with her brother to search for him. “She couldn’t find anything. She couldn’t find his apartment, she couldn't find his belongings, she couldn't find him,” she said.

One of Dickson's friends, fellow teacher Noriyasu Li, created a profile for him on the Google person finder application.

“Monty's a very outgoing, bright, and hardworking individual,” Li, who met Dickson when they studied together in Alaska before they joined the JET program in Japan in 2009, wrote to msnbc.com. “I believe he worked very hard as a teacher. His advanced Japanese skills must have also paid off, as I heard he was very well spoken in the community of Rikuzentakata ... and connected well with his students. Overall he is a fantastic individual, and I can only hope and pray that he is still somewhere surviving.”

Dickson, whose parents died at different times when he was a child, lived with Fredrickson in his late teens. She said he always worked hard in school to make his mother proud, excelling in academics, and continued to strive for academic achievement after her death -- finishing among the top of his class in high school and at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he received a bachelor's degree in language with an emphasis in Japanese.

She said he was a "good kid" with a good sense of humor who had first gotten interested in Japanese culture through video games, and then studied Japanese throughout his education, including spending about two years in the country as a student. He arrived in Japan in August 2009 as a JET teacher, and had planned on teaching there for three years. JET said he is the last of their teachers who is still missing.

Fredrickson said she didn't know if the family would go to Japan to look for him.

"It’s really hard because, we’re going to find him. What capacity, we don’t know," she said.

Courtesy of the Anderson family

The body of Taylor Anderson, left, a 24-year-old teacher, has been found in Japan, her family says. She was last seen in Ishinomaki, Japan, on March 11 after the earthquake.

An  American family  was in mourning Monday after  learning that their daughter and sibling, a teacher and lifelong student of Japanese culture,  had been found dead in Japan –- the first known American victim of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Taylor Anderson, a 24-year-old from Richmond, Va., had lived in Japan since August 2008. She was last seen after the powerful earthquake struck Japan on March 11, riding her bike away from the school where she taught after helping to get her students home.

“It is with deep regret that we inform you that earlier this morning we received a call from the U.S. Embassy in Japan that they had found our beloved Taylor's body,” the Anderson family wrote in a statement. “We would like to thank all those (whose)  prayers and support have carried us through this crisis.  Please continue to pray for all who remain missing and for the people of Japan.”

 Anderson’s family, who had mounted a long-distance search for Anderson, could not immediately be reached for comment.

But a Facebook poster, who gave his name as Ramon Badcock, said he met Anderson in Japan and will remember her positive spirit.

"She was of a rare breed of people, always happy and positive, kind and generous, with a smile that seemed to go on forever," he wrote in an email to msnbc.com. "I will mourn, but more importantly I will celebrate her life, for it was a beautiful life and I know she would prefer that."

Until Monday's announcement, none of the estimated 50,000-plus Americans living in or visiting Japan when the quake hit had been confirmed killed. The U.S. State Department said it was seeking further information regarding the death.

Most of Taylor’s friends and colleagues in the JET Programme (the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme), stayed at their schools overnight after the quake, but not Taylor, said her sister, Julia Anderson.

Courtesy of the Anderson family

Taylor Anderson with her parents, mother Jean and father Andy.

“Taylor helped in the evacuation of the students onto the athletic field, waited for parents to pick up the students and whoever was leftover went to higher ground. Taylor decided to go back to her apartment, but by her bike, and so we know she left her school and that’s the last we know,” Anderson said  late last week.

“Shortly thereafter, the tsunami warning sirens started to sound," her father, Andy, a 53-year-old real estate developer, said last week. “She probably had 10, 15 minutes of bike riding before the water hit.”

Taylor, who was living in Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture, started learning Japanese when she was in middle school, and eventually minored in Asian Studies at college. When she left for Japan, the departure was emotional but the family was proud of her. 

“She was living the life that she always wanted and she was getting to know a culture she was always fascinated with,” Julia said last week. “Her students loved her.”