Tsunami-affected Sri Lanka is slogging to rebuild from the scratch. It is a painstaking job, and apart from international support, the driving force is hope. Rajeev Nair writes
In Galle, southern Sri Lanka, the rain rattles. It drenches the relief workers, who slog on in silent gloom. The talk in this coastal city is that an unrelenting downpour would have washed away much of its debris. Relief teams don't agree. The drains are blocked; rains mean more problems.
Galle had built part of its immediate past fortune from the sea and its beaches. When the sea snatched its share, it took away everything in its gushing wake giving back lifeless bodies, and past wealth now crumbled to uselessness.
After the easy friendliness of Colombo, the capital city that is the first gate for virtually the entire relief materials pouring in from different parts of the world, the true scale of the tsunami damage in the southern districts hits you with shocking abruptness.
The isolated destruction in the north of Colombo does not prepare one for the total battering the south has taken. Riding down to Galle, the first signs of what is in store, pop up in Kalutara, where a whole line of houses by the seashore are today nothing but heaps of wooden splinters and lumps of bricks.
Further down, it is business as usual. Children go to school. Shops are up and running. Buses ply. Nature's fury took selective turns to lash out at helpless humans. It spared some; tormented others; and destroyed the rest.
The Galle road that has brought in the hippies of the 70s to Sri Lanka's sleepy villages lines the coast, and on either sides, huts are in rubbles; electric posts lie overturned; iron shutters on shops are bent on their middle — it is a vast stretch of absolute devastation.
On the way to Galle, a court is in session. People stand huddled. Are there old scores to settle? Even now? Cemeteries line the roadside. That is a coastal tradition of burying the dead by the sea. Today, they add to the sadness.
There are dogs and cows, at every turn. The animals had better survival instincts than the 'more developed' man.
Some schools are shelters for the displaced. At others, chalks and notebooks are left to dry; broken blackboards lie in piles. Chairs and tables strewn limb-less on the muddy ground.
A railway track runs parallel to the shore, sometimes cutting in through the villages. It lies twisted into mud tracks in places; at others, the tracks project upward to resemble a DNA double helix spiral.
That is demonstrative of just part of the power of the waves, which had lifted off a train, the Ruhunukumari, off the tracks, killing over 1,500, many of the dead being local villagers who had rushed in to the train to escape the surging waves.
On the way are shops that sell traditional masks, gems and jewellery. Today, the residents need modern masks to escape the stench of death and decay. Death, here, smells organic. A clinging odour you cannot wash off.
Galle, the city centre, is limping back to normalcy. The bus station, the scene of the oft-repeated television footage of the tsunami, where once waters overflowed, has lines of buses. The Galle International Cricket Ground is being repaired.
Very near, the Dutch fort and its innards have been unaffected. The waves rose, at some places spilling in water through the ramparts, but did little damage.
Declared a World Heritage Site in 1988, the fort was first built by the Portuguese, fortified by the Dutch in 1663, and strengthened by the British. For those who look at the greater good, was the offshoot of the Dutch invasion to prove a boon some four centuries later?
In the city centre, a statue of Col. Henry Steel Olcott, the American who embraced Buddhism and devoted his life to Buddhist education, presides mutely over an eerie row of shops with little business. Yet, a printing press is working. But Philanthropic Grocery — shut. Marshmallow Stores — just the board remains. There is only so much of devastation the mind can take. After that, there is only numbness.
But then, much has already been written about the rampant damage unleashed by the tsunami. Today, in Sri Lanka, the focus is on the future, on a painstaking process of rebuilding, especially at places where immediate relief work has already been set in motion.
To the north of Colombo, in Hendala, a camp for the displaced which operated in a church has almost closed down. People have returned to what were their homes, and a few still return to the camp at night only to sleep.
There is a lot to do during day, little of which is remunerative, which brings the focus on the biggest crisis that awaits the tsunami-affected in Sri Lanka: When can they resume productive employment? Fishing folk hardly venture into the sea — the boats are still resting on the roads, washed ashore by the tidal waves. It is a cumbersome task, taking it back to the waters.
The challenge currently before the Sri Lankan government is not in simply rebuilding the homes. The overall relief and rehabilitation efforts are being supervised by the Committee for National Operations (CNO), established by the president, Chandrika Kumaratunga. Sri Lanka has also formed a 'Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation,' Tafren.
The immediate concern is to convince many of the tsunami-affected not to build on within 100 metres from the coastline. The government plans to make it a buffer zone so as to minimise the impact of rough seas.
The task is not easy. There is a grey area even when it comes to the exact distance that is to be left without manmade structures; some government representatives speak of extending the construction ban to 200 to 300 metres. There is also talk of a clause limiting building restrictions to "new" structures.
All these have a direct bearing on the economy, which having been ravaged by civil war, had only begun to enjoy the benefits of a two-year-old cease-fire the government had signed with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Tourism was beginning to blossom.
Vasantha Leelanand, president of Sri Lanka Association of Inbound Tour Operators and managing director of Walkers Tours, says the country was on its course to achieve the target of average tourism spend at $100. Before the tsunami hit, it was $67.
While any revival in tourism — a mainstay of the economy after tea and the foreign exchange remitted in by expatriate Sri Lankans, many of them working in the Gulf — can only be considered after January according to modest projections, tour operators and airline companies, draw attention to Sri Lankan inland tourism.
“Sri Lanka is more than about the beaches. There are the central hills, the tea plantations, the heritage activities, the natural parks – these can form the basis of a short-term shift in strategy to bring in tourists," says Kumar De Silva, area manager, Sri Lanka and Maldives, Etihad Airways.
Amidst the pain of reconstruction, the positive outlook that envelopes these words is not to be missed. Here is a nation going through insufferable pain, and what can drive them on is nothing but hope.
Hope, it springs in Sri Lanka. In the face of the young lad, who sells betel leaves in the devastated city centre of Galle; in the couple, who sits drinking from a tender coconut on broken down chairs on the shambles of their house — probably that is where their dining room was; in the Shah Rukh Khan film posters that dot Galle; in the men who build their homes brick upon brick; in the children who assist their parents in clearing off pieces of mud clods; in the Buddhist monk, who stays solemnly by a group of sad men and women, who had come to bury a dead... And perhaps also in the crowds that have formed near the only 'working' shop — a beverage outlet.
Hope, however, doesn't come easy. The destruction is so total, many of the affected do not know where to start from. At a camp for the displaced in Galle, where the UAE Red Crescent team distributed relief materials, the people want to urgently rebuild homes, they want a productive job — now, they have nothing. Some of them, little children too, with not even loved ones to hold on to....All robbed by a sea, which they cannot wish away: The ocean still holds their future.
Indeed, amidst the devastation all, the sea is a relentless presence. It simply is there, blue and cool, now resting drowsily after feasting sumptuously on the little triumphs of mankind.
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Nature shapes
Cartographers are hard at work sketching the current Sri Lankan coastline. The devastating tsunami, reportedly, has altered it, taking off vast chunks of land, depositing them elsewhere, or not at all.
One visible alteration that the tsunami has brought in to the coastline can be glimpsed at Bentota, famous for its sea turtle conservation projects.
Here, the Bentota River houses on its banks a string of holiday resorts, which operate boat rides for tourists.
Bentota River closes off in a slice of land that blocks out the waves of the Indian Ocean. Much of this piece of priceless landmass has been eaten way by the tidal waves. The lagoon today stands exposed; the placid backwaters now surging to the ebb and flow of the tidal waves.
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Facts, not fiction
When man fails to explain events, they surrender to the mystery of the supernatural. If Thailand had thrown up stories of 'ghost sighting,' Sri Lanka has many tales to offer of the waves washing away everything else but hardly touching some of the places of worship.
Local residents are particularly excited as they narrate the 'miracle' that has left practically unaffected a temple in honour of Seenigama near Hikkaduwa.
It can be accessed from a Buddhist temple by the roadside, where vehicles stop to make offerings for on-road 'protection'. The temple lies a little into the ocean and visitors sometimes walk across the sea to it during low tides, says Karu Naratna, a local tour guide.
The tsunami ravaged the buildings far into the shore but virtually skipped the temple, offshore, taking with it just a few tiles from the roof.
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A leaf from history
Was history repeating itself in Sri Lanka? Is the tsunami that battered the island nation on Dec. 26, 2004, a retake of a disaster that wrecked the nation in ancient times?
History has reference to Queen Vihara Mahadevi, the daughter of King Kelani Tissa, who had put a Buddhist monk to cruel death. The unfairness of the episode is supposed to have lifted the waves of the ocean to frightening heights.
The king repented and offered his daughter, Vihara, to the ocean. This calmed the seas, says the lore, and fortunately, Vihara was swept safely ashore, albeit in a foreign land. The king there married her, and their son Dutugemunu is to this day revered by the Sinhalese for his guts, grit and wisdom.
Dutugemunu, incidentally, means Gemunu the Disobedient. Gemunu is said to have disobeyed his father, who asked him to stay obsequious to the invader Tamil general, Elara. Dutugemunu eventually killed Elara in a fierce battle that also saw a contingent of Buddhist monks aligning with the king.
