Sri Lanka was badly hit by the huge tsunami of December 2004.
A dead child’s hand was one of the most moving images from news broadcasts of the time
My Mission
After spending 2 years living in this lovely place and finding much happiness, I couldn’t help but go there to try to give back some of what I gained.
Known by many names over the centuries: Taprobane, The Emerald Isle, Ceylon, and Serendib (which gave us the word “serendipity” for good luck and happy chance) or even just plain “Paradise”, this ocean island, though troubled, was a very special place to live and work. Legend has is that King Solomon’s Mines were here and there may just be some truth in that: when it rains heavily, gems spill out in the mud in certain places. The name Ratnapura means “city of the gems”.
The whole island, frankly, is a jewel and I love it. But what I found was agonizing, to say the least. I was sponsored largely by a big multi-level marketing company (NSA), though I was not a member of their organization. That’s very generous.
Deseret Biologicals in Utah, also came strongly to help with funding and support: http://www.desbio.com
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 Lavinia); 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 it had been crowded, as usual, with families bathing. Hundreds were swept to their death. The morning I took this photograph, one week later, it looked sombre and almost deserted.
No Time To Lose!
I was provided with transportation and headed to the disaster area. En route were many dismal and moving scenes that spoke of impossible conditions and certain death for tens of thousands (actually over 150,000 in the end).
All along the route homeless families stood, shocked and forlorn, with nowhere to go. The world governments, I may say, were slow to respond. The US “contribution” was derisory, when contrasted with the indulgence of a fake imperial war in Iraq, costing $millions per day.
What did this cryptic sight mean? A dead child? There was no-one to ask…
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…
I finally arrived in Galle, the main city that was affected. Tens of thousands were swept out to sea. Many more were left dead under the rubble and stank the place to Hell. It was indescribable!
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. Most of the corpses were 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)
I’ve no pictures of corpses for you, it wouldn’t be appropriate. But I took this shot of shoes left behind as the victims were swept out to sea. Who were these people, I wondered?
I was most anxious to find a special family we had befriended while living there (in fact the father was our taxi driver when on our honeymoon, that’s how we met them!) It didn’t look good. Where they had lived was flattened rubble and no houses…
See the next page for what I found…
Good man is everybody, who helped after Tsunami.
Still lot of help is needed, do you want to go ahead and help to do it ?
Rgds JVL