Just over ten years ago, a powerful undersea earthquake caused a devastating tsunami that rapped around two-thirds of Sri Lanka’s coastline on Boxing Day, at around 8:30am. Being a holiday, locals were fishing, bathing and playing on the beaches. Within a matter of minutes some 35,000 people were dead, thousands were missing and over half a million survivors would soon be displaced.
Having lived in Sri Lanka a few years before the tsunami struck, I became concerned about the situation and contacted various aid agencies in Australia to see if they were putting together any teams of volunteers. I found out about an organization called Volunteers Sri Lanka, which was working in the recovery effort on the ground. I joined their outfit and over the course of three months I mainly helped build relocation homes for families in the South and East of the country.
I arrived a few months into the relief effort, and decided to first visit the village and house where I had stayed in 2001, situated on the beautiful Southern coastal stretch of Sri Lanka. The son of a Sinhalese family I had lived with greeted me with a certain sense of both relief and grief. He explained that his father had been killed in the house on that fateful morning. Taking a look at the construction, with only part of the wall left standing and all the neighbouring buildings flattened, the seriousness of the disaster began to sink in. I picked up a stone from the residence, which had brought me so much joy back in 2001 and put it in my pocket with the permission of the son, who was visibly distraught.
A kilometre back from the sea, international aid agencies had already been through, setting up portable wells and some temporary shelters for the affected. A Sinhalese man I met in the South told me he had lost his wife, two daughters and his home, and philosophically added: This is Sri Lanka, what to do?
If the Buddha was right in saying, All life is suffering, then this island has had more than its fair share over the years.
In June 2005, I spoke to a fragile Tamil woman in the East, who said she had nightmares of gunfire, grenades exploding and of another tsunami happening, but was grateful that foreign aid workers were bringing some assistance to her village.
Much of the tsunami-affected families were still living in temporary shelters, tents or refugee camps in the Northeast for the months that followed.
Surveys at the time suggested that congestion and a multitude of other hardships had made daily life inside the dwellings nearly impossible. Many social problems were on the rise from this kind of transitional living.
With livelihoods taking a hit, drug and alcohol dependency were at an all time high and many survivors were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Women inside the shelters said they felt unsafe at night. As volunteers, we faced some safety issues building the shelters, particularly during the monsoon months because of loose electrical wires that could cause electrocution during the rain.
Long-standing conflicts over land, exacerbated by the mass displacement of people, complicated matters further and the government was struggling to deliver any lasting solutions. There was a mood within some of the affected families that it would have been better to die in the tsunami than to have had to live through that kind of suffering.