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connect with page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 THIRD AND FOURTH DAY |
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| We faced the long drive across country to the stricken area of Yala and Kirinda in the remote south east. Early reports said Kirinda had simply been wiped off the face of the Earth. We had links with the Yala area which made it a good base for us. Colombo had no real knowledge of how well it was covered with relief aid and wanted me to let them know if there were sufficient doctors and medical care. | |||||||
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The journey passed through pleasant terrain. Sri Lanka is green and lush farmland and jungle. |
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I met with the local Postmaster (actually the Postmistress's husband!), who had helped identify all the bodies. He knew them all. But his income has dropped to zero since the wave. | ||||||
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Just when you think you've heard it all... The Holy Father told me (through a translator) that some parents had been faced with split-second agonizing decisions: when the tsunami came into view, an adult with only 2 arms could only grab 2 children to save and had to let the others perish. Early on, I decided trauma counseling was going to be more needed than bandages and diarrhoea pills! |
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Well met! Here I'm talking to the Minister for Rural Human Resources Development, the Right Honourable Member of Parliament Mr R M C B Ratnayake. It's good to see parliamentarians out in the field, in such a remote area as this. Not a dab of dirt on his white silk shirt though. |
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Here's a thing. How do you account for the fact that the
nearby bungalow, made of brick, is flattened beyond recognition - yet the
little palm straw hut in the distance, right on the shore, escaped?
(close up below)
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| ACTION One of the first tasks to assess was the water supply. Fortunately, rains coinciding with the tsunami had meant a plentiful supply in the groundwater. But was it contaminated? Here I learned something strange, which is that virtually no animals died: there were no corpses of livestock, wild life etc. rotting in the streams and water supply. Now what did the animals know that humans didn't? All had got to high ground well before the wave struck. The next thing to consider was the plight of people stuck in relief camps. As a doctor I considered this a high-risk solution. OK, at first. But to keep people in close confines is to invite trouble. On the journey down, what had struck me most was that everything was normal until the last kilometer to the coast: people watched TV, drank sodas, ran around in cars, had plenty of food, telephones worked... So the strategy of confining people to the disaster areas was a double whammy - it meant they were exposed to the dangers of institutional diseases, such as typhoid and cholera, but were also kept to zones where there was no infrastructure and virtually no resources. I immediately decided that it was an urgent priority to get people out of the camps. They could go to family and friends, be temporarily billeted in the functioning hinterland, or if necessary to put them in hotels and pick up the bill. Even a free bus shuttle to the nearby town which has supplies could help. I rang the former Prime Minister's sister, a work colleague and (now) friend of my wife Vivien, and asked her to pass on to him these observations. It needs action at government level here. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka has a very committee-type mentality (one of the fatalities of a socialist democracy, I suppose). Everything has to be discussed at length. 2,000 inmates in one camp shared just 2 toilets. The local committee was debating whether more toilets were needed!! I ask you. But there was worse. Local government officials were actively obstructing relief efforts by anyone not "approved" by the committee. They had even tried to arrest this man, Marlon Mendis, for doing non-approved relief work from the local hotel.
By the time I met him he'd been on the rescue mission over a week, had not seen his family in Colombo in that time and was exhausted, mentally and physically, by the stress of all the dead bodies he'd collected. The committee members, of course, never get involved in work; their "rôle" is carried out sat on their butts. There was even an attempt, ongoing as I post, to shut down a private camp for refugees, run by a wealthy well-wisher, and the local young hot-head Marxists have demanded the police arrest the relief workers. They were trying to grab all the limelight for themselves and assiduously fought any "capitalist" help, which they thought would detract from their image of being the only saviours of the people. Fortunately, the local Chief of Police isn't taking the bait. But ultimately, this political wrangling costs the victims their relief help. At the time of posting, I can report that the camp near me is down from 1,000 inmates to just 20 families. The other "private" camp has about the same. In some instances, getting people home was just as simple as buying cooking utensils and firelighters, so they could fend for themselves. People still consider the rubble "home". It's an important perspective. One woman refused to leave her ruined home and had sat on the pile of wood and bricks for days... she had lost 6 children and her husband. All she had left in the world was her jewelry, which lay under several feet of debris. But she wouldn't leave it, for fear of looters. |
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| Telecoms and IT continues to be absolutely dire here. There is no international dialling and out going lines are very shaky. I have to drive over 10 miles to the nearest functioning town (Kirinda, as I said, has all but gone) to log onto an analogue line and upload the web postings. Please be patient! | |||||||
