Their lives were turned upside down when they were orphaned by the 2004 tsunami. Now a former Hampshire student tells SARAH JONES how he and his two brothers are determined to help other orphans with a new business venture.

JUST moments after waking up the morning after an idyllic family Christmas Day in paradise, a wall of water smashed into their beachfront guesthouse with the force of a “brick wall travelling at 200mph”.

As the walls of their bedroom gave way around them, Rob Forkan and his younger brother scrambled up them desperately trying to climb to safety.

With no idea of what had happened to their parents and two younger siblings who had been sleeping in another room, the teenagers clung to the roof for their lives as they tried to make sense of the devastation swirling around them.

Speculating that perhaps a bomb had gone off at sea, it was in fact one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.

Leaving nearly 300,000 dead in 11 countries, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake had ripped apart the seafloor off the coast of northwest Sumatra, unleashing a monster tsunami that travelled thousands of kilometres across the Indian Ocean.

As the water finally subsided and the four children were reunited, they embarked on a frantic search for their parents.

Hearing that their dad’s body had been found, they were unable to find their mum and the youngsters were forced to trek to safety and fly back from Sri Lanka to the UK alone.

Their worst fears were finally confirmed several months later when both their parents’ bodies were brought home – two more victims of the Boxing Day tsunami.

Now more than seven years on from the tragedy, they have rebuilt their lives and with his two younger brothers, Rob is determined to make a difference with a fun and quirky new flipflop business.

Inspiring and full of positivity, the boys are channelling part of the profits into an orphanage in India.

And they also hope to one day open and sustain their own orphanage there in their parents’ memory.

“When you’ve been through the experience we’ve been through, you realise there’s more to life than just making money,” says Rob, now 24. “We thought if we can do something where we can make a living from it and give back at the same time then everyone’s a winner.”

The former Brockenhurst College student adds: “We were all lucky to survive ourselves and so nothing really fazes us now.

We’ve developed the attitude where it doesn’t matter what you put in front of us, we’ll find a way around it or we’ll just do it, because of what we’ve been through.”

Enjoying an unconventional upbringing, Rob’s parents, Sandra and Kevin, took him out of school to move to the Indian state of Goa when he was 13, along with his two younger brothers and little sister, after falling in love with the country on holiday.

Meanwhile Rob’s two older sisters, Marie and Jo, decided to stay behind in the UK.

Selling the family home, the Forkans loved their new beachfront lifestyle and the children enrolled in a local school.

During the monsoon season the family would return to the UK for a few months each year, spending much of their time in New Milton and Bournemouth.

It was on a whim that they decided to spend Christmas 2004 in Sri Lanka, a country they had never visited before.

So the family headed to the beautiful coastal village of Weligama to enjoy the holiday. On Boxing Day, Rob – then 17 – woke up to a few inches of water coming into the room he shared with his brother Paul, then aged 15.

Sandra and Rob were with their youngest children Matty and Rosie, then 12 and eight, in a separate room that opened on to the beach.

“We were so close to the beach that we assumed the tide had come up too far,” says Rob.

“But before we knew it the door and the windows had smashed in with the force of the water coming towards us.

“We made it onto the roof and it was literally a case of clinging on for dear life.

“The water was going so far inland that it felt like we were out at sea and floating on a raft.”

When the water seemed to lose momentum, Rob spotted Matty in a tree and swam out to him.

“It was at that point that the water started being sucked back out and I just managed to cling on to a tree. If I hadn’t, I would have been swept straight back out to sea.”

As soon as it seemed safe, Rob, who had a nasty cut on his arm, rushed inland with his brothers.

The scenes of utter destruction the boys faced reminded Rob of a disaster movie.

“It literally was like the end of the world,” he says.

Trampling their way through the wreckage, homes had been destroyed and cars flipped onto their sides.

Hours later they discovered their little sister Rosie with a deep gash on her arm.

She had survived the tsunami by clinging to a palm tree.

Desperate for news of their parents, Matty and Rosie told their brothers that Sandra, 40, and Kevin, 50, had carried them on their shoulders before being swept away.

Searching for them at the local hospital, Rob was confronted with a football pitch of bodies – but he couldn’t find them.

Eventually, a waiter from their guesthouse told Rob that he had seen his father and that he was dead.

Deciding to keep the tragic news from his youngest siblings, they continued to search for their mother until sundown but to no avail.

Forced to make the agonising decision to leave, Rob knew their focus had to be getting his little brother and sister to safety.

“We knew our parents would want us to get them out of harm’s way and we couldn’t wait around for days because it wasn’t safe, we didn’t know if it was going to come back.

“My little brother is a chronic asthmatic and had no medication, and Rosie was so young.”

With no food or possessions, the barefoot orphans headed north for over 100 miles.

Eventually hitching a lift with a truck, they arrived exhausted at a makeshift embassy several days later.

Flown home to the UK, the children stayed with their sister Marie, now 29, in Fleet.

Enduring an agonising wait, they received no news of their parents until March when they were informed that their bodies had been found and were to be repatriated.

After several months, the children returned to school with Paul sitting his GCSEs and Rob getting a job as a lifeguard.

It was 12 months ago that the three brothers set up Gandys Flip Flops.

After years travelling the world living in the shoes, they have built their brand on the beliefs they learnt visiting slums and being schooled in India as they grew up.

Designing the stylish and colourful flip flops themselves, the branding includes a tiny footprint which reminds them of their mum’s favourite poem, Mary Stevenson’s Footprints in the Sand.

“We’re channelling all our energies into Gandys,” says Rob. “Our experiences have taught us that there’s more to life than your standard nine to five job. We wanted something that we could be passionate about and believe in. The brand is quite vibrant and quite quirky, that is how we live and that’s what we’re about.

“What happened to us is tragic but we want people to know about what we’re doing now and how we’ve turned it all around.”

To find out more, visit gandysflipflops.com.