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FIRST MORNING |
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I missed the New Year celebrations. Somewhere over the
Pacific en route for Taipei, I passed the dateline and it was
suddenly 2005! After an arduous 36 hours flight (12 hours layover in
Singapore) I reached the Mount Lavinia Hotel. It's an old British colonial
pile (the Governor's mansion, named after his wife); it was used as a
hospital in the movie Bridge on the River Kwai. I crashed out and
woke hours later to the familiar scene of Dehiwala beach, beneath my
balcony. On Sunday December 26th is was crowded, as usual, with families
bathing. Hundreds were swept to their death. This morning, one week later,
it looked sombre and almost deserted.
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A few quick meeting with old friends
and I was ready for off. |
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Homeless families were standing bemused all along the road south to Galle. Typically, is is very warm here but, ironically, there have been several days rain since the flood, making camping out a very unpleasant experience for many. | ||
| Some had lost everything. For this mother and son, all
that was left of their "home" is a heap of rubble and four walls Actually
2.5 walls! The woman had lost her 22-year old daughter, snatched by the sea but at least her son survived to comfort her. |
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| Particularly worrying is the loss of the fishing fleet all along the coast. Boats were picked up and tossed everywhere, sometimes clear across the highway. Many were smashed beyond repair. Sri Lanka relies on the surrounding ocean for its food. This will be a sore blow in months to come. | |||
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The sheer violence of the wave can be seen from what it did to the steel and concrete of the railway tracks here. Further south a train was swept from the track and over 1,000 drowned in the wreck. | ||
| Even the dead were not safe from the tsunami, as this decimated Buddhist cemetery by the shore shows! |
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| But the worst-hit zone, I knew was the town of Galle in the south. Over 3,000 were drowned in just minutes. I headed there with heart in mouth: some very good Sri Lanka friends lived in a small house, right on the beach. They could not have been worse placed that they were, right in the path of the wave. The sights in the city of Galle were just heart-rending. | |||
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The town looked as if it had been hit by a tidal wave.. Oh sorry. It had! (300 yards from the sea) | ||
| What chance could frail human forms have if the violence of the wave could do such damage to a solid brick building? (200 yards from the sea) |
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This stunned woman sits in the rubble. She lost 2 sons. (200 yards from the sea) | ||
| The stench of rotting corpses was so bad that even the
locals felt the need to shield their noses as they scurried about their
day. Half the dead are still in the rubble and mud. Most are
unidentifiable. There is no CSI here to match dental records and DNA.
The dead were simply rounded-up, photographed and then laid in communal graves. I've seen plenty of dead people but nothing prepared me for the thick charnel house odour that stalked the streets of Galle. (100 yards from the sea)
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This was a shop in the busy marketplace. I bought a
garment here on my honeymoon, in 2002. (100 yards from the sea) |
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| I've no pictures of corpses for you. Far more poignant were the hundreds and hundreds of shoes and sandals littered along the shore. I collected these pathetic few and photographed them. Who were these people? (50 yards from the sea) |
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| Finally, I had to face up to the question of whether my friends were safe or drowned. On the evidence I saw, I thought their chances were very small. I had tried phoning throughout the journey - but no reply, The cell phone was "out of service". | |||
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With some difficulty I located this ruin. Clearly no-one
could have survived such a calamity. It was a sombre thought that in 2002 I had
sat and had tea and cakes in what was now a level ruin. We are less than
200 yards from the beach here. (no wonder nobody answered the phone!) |
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| The only way I could be sure this was the right place was
the motorcycle. It was a World War Two Japanese bike which Upali, the
owner, had shown me proudly. He had been hoping to restore it,
when money was available (he drove one of the 3-wheel taxis we call "Tuk
Tuks", after the 2-stroke engine noise). By this time I was fighting back tears and thinking of him and his wife and kids. Was it possible they were not at home when the wave struck? Only by a miracle. |
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Don't say you don't believe in miracles? I do.
After a few minutes a young girl came towards me over the rubble, recognized me and gave me a hug. She yelled out for the rest of them and in moments I was getting hugs and gave in to a few tears. By chance, all except Upali were safely inland. He was a tough ex-soldier (with bullet holes to prove it) and just wasn't ready to die. He came through. They all came through and posed for a photograph for my wife Vivien, back home.
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| Even so, considering the wreckage, there was little to
celebrate. Here is what remains of the kitchen, where they cook and eat al
fresco. No walls, no house indeed, but a kitchen! Yet such was the generosity and kindness of these people, they gave me a coconut to drink! I could not refuse such graciousness. |
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So, with cash to spend in the shops that still had
supplies and promises to send more food, I took leave of them. I think this picture says it all for me: the devastation -- but the hope, the dignity, the resilience, the loving nature of these folk leaves me without words, in a world all gone wrong with violence, politics and vicious religious divisions. |
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