Sri Lanka hangs from the subcontinent like a pearl.
It glistens in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, where white-tipped waves break on golden palm-fringed beaches. An island of deep green paddy fields and ponderous water buffalo, of noisy traffic-choked roads and speeding trishaws, wandering cows and stray dogs, lively coastal towns and fishermen pushing out their boats, working elephants and quiet temples. An interior of rolling tea plantations and jagged mountains. Of dense steamy jungle crawling with leeches, cut by sparkling rivers. This is the island of Serendipity – a pleasant surprise – eulogised in A Thousand and One Nights as the destination of Sinbad’s last voyages. An island that surprises you with the spiciest of curries eaten with the fingers from a banana leaf, smart shopping malls with top clothing brands (made on the island) at bargain prices, breakfast on the mountain road to Kandy where the air is crisp, to sample the most delicate of Ceylon teas. Somewhat alarmingly, there are machine gun emplacements and bombed-out buildings in the city centre, tight security and fear of attack. Despite intractable civil strife, the most pleasant surprise of all remains the warmth of the people of Sri Lanka.
But on the morning of 26th December 2004 the coast of Sri Lanka changed forever. A massive underwater earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra set off the tsunami that hit the Sri Lankan shoreline, sweeping around the island, crushing everything in its path, destroying ninety thousand homes, smashing boats and washing away belongings. Forty thousand people died, many more lost everything.
The coast near Galle was a wasteland. Driving eastwards for hours along the coastal road, the devastation was unrelenting. Houses reduced to a single wall or a pile of broken masonry, splintered wood and smashed glass. Some buildings completely obliterated except for the foundation slab, even this in places having been uprooted, broken into pieces and unceremoniously dumped inland. Soiled clothes, ruined mattresses, broken toys, dented pots, crumpled ornaments, rotten food, torn plastic bags were everywhere, scattered in the debris, lying in dark stagnant pools, snagged on shrubs, or hanging in the branches of trees; the remnants of lives washed away.
And there were the survivors. Huddled in half-demolished houses or squatting in tents pitched on bare foundations. Some wandering aimlessly among the rubble as if trying to comprehend the nemesis of their community. People wracked with grief, grappling with the enormity of the disaster that had overwhelmed them without warning or mercy, as yet unable to summon the will to clear up the terrible mess. All wanting to pass on their story to the incredulous passers-by, as if its telling and retelling would ease the pain.
A woman, thin and scantily clad stumbled through the ruins north of Galle, holding tightly a few crumpled photographs of her former life. She had lost her husband and children. Beneath the trees amidst the debris of levelled houses, she told us how the wave had taken everything, and asked for food and money. Behind her was the train that had stopped because of news of a wave that had arrived further along the coast. As a supposedly safe refuge the people remained on board and it became a death trap, drowning two thousand people when the water overturned and swamped it. Its maroon-red coaches dented and scratched by the ordeal, were now upright again and visited by all passers-by as a memorial to the dead.
‘The sea gave us everything we had and the sea took it all away,’ said a small, middle-aged lady, standing outside the temporary house being built for her by Sri Lankan development organisation, LEADS. She and her husband, a fisherman, had worked all their lives to be the proud owners of a four-roomed house, which they had recently extended, on the coast near Tangalle. The temporary house was a single- roomed wooden shed, erected on a concrete base with a tin roof. It was hot inside. A welcome shelter when you are homeless and better than a tent for a few weeks, but not a long-term family home, especially in a tropical climate. ‘Now we are no better off than when we started,’ she said. Eighteen of these temporary structures were being erected on land just outside the town in the grounds of a temple. Sri Lankan carpenters were raising frames and hammering rafters in place, assisted by displaced local people glad to be doing something to help themselves.
A woman pointed out the remains of her house while her two children, thankfully spared, balanced on the rubble and posed for photographs. In this coastal community near Tangalle, the tsunami had been selective, cutting vast swathes through the village, and leaving other stretches intact. A boy, standing where his house had been, told us of his father whose body had been found high up in a tree. His twin brother came a stood with him. They were glad to see the LEADS community worker, their link to aid and food. Many were lodging with family, neighbours and friends in the houses that remained. A man shinned up a tree and cut some coconuts down. He sliced the tops off the large green fruits and I enjoyed its cool, sweet juice, as he watched, glad to give us a gift.
The Tangalle Bay Hotel stands on a point between two sandy bays, constructed along nautical lines with decks and cabins reaching down towards the beach. Some of its lower rooms had been destroyed. Up and down the coast from the hotel the remains of boats littered the beaches – wooden bows, fibreglass cabins, floats, tangled nets – some straddled across the rocks, others stranded inland up on the bank or even by the roadside. Taking an end-of-the day walk along the beach between the hotel and the town, I met a man lingering among the ruins of a building. A restaurant sign lay upside down and broken, and a single patio table remained upright; cruel reminders of his lost livelihood. The man told me that the first time the wave came in it caused some flooding but not much damage. Then it went a long way out. The second time it swept all before it. His family had scrambled up the bank to the road, which at this point ran fifteen or so metres above the shore, just in time to see his house and business vanish. Now they were living with relatives in the town and he didn’t know what he would do for a living.
In Hambantota, Granville was visiting the Sunday market when the tsunami struck. He rushed home worried about his wife and two daughters. Due to the shape of the coastline, the wave overwhelmed the town from two directions. It crashed through eleven rows of houses and left a barren void several football pitches wide. The people ran from one wave and the second, coming from another direction, cut them down and swept them inland, depositing them into the muddy salt flats of Karagan Levaya lagoon beyond the road. From here the army pulled out busses and trucks, bikes and cars, and a thousand bodies. They laid them out on the raised bank for people to identify. The government said five thousand had died in Hambantota; local people estimated the number in excess of eight thousand, making it the worst affected town in Sri Lanka.
Granville eventually found the bodies. His wife lay beside the children. ‘I cried for a month,’ he said. He found himself becoming more and more depressed. But noticing the effect of his grief on others, he decided to use his social worker skills to help those worse off than himself – those who hadn’t even found the bodies of their loved ones. ‘Now I only cry when I’m alone,’ he said. He allowed me to take his photograph and his tortured-brave expression still haunts me.
The group surrounding us told of another Hambantota resident who had been working overseas and, on hearing the news, had returned to find his house and family gone, and was so shocked that he had a heart attack on the spot and died. Post-tsunami Hambantota was a desolate place. Graffiti on the remaining wall of a house read: ‘No worries’. Beneath, in Sinhala a rebuke for those coming to look, ‘no worries for you.’ We left in silence, stunned by the sadness and grief we had encountered, and the stark contrast between our privilege and their loss gave me a sharp pang of guilt.
Serendipity hangs from the subcontinent like a tear.
Near Matara the army had erected a camp of temporary houses. An officer in the smart attire of the Sri Lankan Engineers’ regiment proudly showed guests the toilet block with its neat plumbing. A naval man with three young and cheerful daughters stood on the doorstep of one of the houses, smiling, glad to have a roof over his head. The camp was in the grounds of a temple, its white domes visible through the trees.
Worship at Matara’s Dutch Reformed Church was almost over as outside a hundred people gathered, peering over the wall, anxious not to miss out on their allotted aid. Mostly women, they wore colourful saris and held umbrellas against the midday heat. The mood was amiable enough, although as they sensed the service ending, they surged forward. Waving pink and yellow forms coded according to their level of need, the people pressed against the fence, those without forms arguing their case. A makeshift desk was set up in the entrance and LEADS workers and volunteers collected up paperwork and checked names. We helped others inside the church assemble relief packs: a plastic bucket into which was stashed a knife, fork and spoon set, a mug, a plastic plate, packets of dried food, and a comb. Like a pack for camping, basic yet a start. The people queued patiently and remained good-natured in what must have been a demeaning process for previously self-sufficient families.
On the way back to Colombo it was evident that a big clear-up had begun. Army, navy and volunteer groups equipped with trucks and bulldozers were shifting rubble. Tented camps and areas of temporary housing had sprung up all along the coast, their signs a who’s who of NGOs: Save the Children and Oxfam, the UN, Christian Aid and more. There were tents of all shapes and sizes – compact expedition tents, medieval shaped white tents, purple ridge tents, large partitioned family tents – some with flags sewn on showing where they had been donated.
Colombo’s busy streets and shops continued as normal and it would have been difficult to know there had been a disaster. From the centre, along the Galle road to the smart suburbs and the Mt Lavinia Hotel (the former British Governor’s residence), all looked well. Doormen in white shorts and pith helmets continued to welcome the European guests, safe within the solid, white walls standing high on a rocky promontory. The pool terrace, where the bars and restaurants were open for business, overlooks the beach in both directions, so you can watch the sea.
But Colombo did not escape totally. Less than a mile from the Mt Lavinia Hotel, on the same beach, the wave stuck near the neat Dehiwala and Mt Lavinia suburbs, flooding some of the roads. The fishing community living along a narrow strip of land between the railway line and the beach took the brunt of the assault. It tore down their houses and broke their boats like matchwood. With nowhere for the rubble to be washed inland because of density of housing, most of it of remained where it had fallen, a garish mass of bricks and roof tiles, wood and fibreglass, clothing and broken utensils, plastic and glass. Each morning as I jogged by, people living in the ruins would appear, washing in the sea, cleaning their teeth, defecating on the beach, wandering about the remains like survivors of a battle revisiting the field. One morning I helped some fishermen launch their boat. But only a few were setting out to catch fish; many had lost their boats, and the market for fish had plummeted as no one wanted to eat produce pulled from the sea where so many had perished.
It was two weeks after the tsunami and near the beach a man showed me part of his concrete house that had been swept away. He and his family were now living in a remaining room that was badly damaged – it looked structurally unsound. An emaciated cow was tethered outside. Each night the children slept in the school by the small temple near the railway line. Another family was holed up in a wooden shack and they invited me in and made me tea. I wondered what these people would do if the government enacted their intention to prevent houses being rebuilt within a couple of hundred metres of the beach, since the land behind was densely housed. That was the day the clear up started and I joined volunteers collecting and burning rubbish.
Sri Lanka’s people were shocked and brutalised by the power of the unpredictable ocean that surrounds and, in one freak event, engulfed them. But in the days and weeks that followed, the seeds of recovery were sown. Joining with development organisations such as LEADS, volunteer Sri Lankans worked day and night packing boxes with bottles of water and food, tents and clothing, utensils and mosquito nets. They checked inventories, took calls from needy areas, loaded trucks and drove them half way round the island, distributing food and equipment. They erected tents, built temporary houses, assessed the ongoing needs of communities, and counselled the traumatised. Aid workers and volunteers from all over the world arrived in support. There were even the tentative signs of cooperation between Government and Tamil Tiger controlled areas. In the midst of disaster and grief, destruction and sorrow, the desire to support those in need revealed those aspects of our shared humanity – love and kindness – which reflect most the image of God in us. Nowhere was this more powerfully present in those traumatic days of early 2005 than in Sri Lanka.
Serendipity hangs from the subcontinent like a heart. Broken but still beating.
From mid-January to early February 2005, Peter Curran, a consultant with Tearfund UK, worked as a human resources adviser with LEADS. He worked with LEADS directors Roshan and Rajan and their staff, and alongside Oenone and Roz from the UK, Jim from Australia, and John from the USA. In those frantic few weeks the shock and sadness of the disaster was matched by the resolution of the survivors, the dedication of those trying to help, and the close-knit teamwork at LEADS.