Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
January 10, 2005 Monday
AFTER THE TSUNAMI: REPORT FROM SRI LANKA;
Save The Children
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF WRITER
KAHAWA, Sri Lanka - It was a typical children's exercise: Take a blank sheet of paper and a pile of crayons, and draw what you like. But the children were survivors of the Dec. 26 tsunami, and their pictures offered Crayola-colored images of some of the frightening memories lingering in their young minds.
In one, rows of stick figures, their arms raised above circular heads, bob in turquoise ripples of waves. In another, a wall of water bears down on a palm-flanked landscape. There are drawings of once-cheerful homes now destroyed, of boats lost to the sea and of cascading waterfalls, all taped to the weathered wall of a school housing 800 families left destitute by the earthquake-driven waves.
Among them are 42 children, many of whom lost parents, siblings or other relatives and who are now part of what aid workers call "the tsunami generation" - the untold thousands of young people whose lives have been forever altered by the disaster. Experts say that with families and homes shattered, friends and siblings lost, and those who provided financial support dead, the children are at a heightened risk of leaving school or of succumbing to the child-sex rings that have long plagued this part of the world.
For older children, there are the added responsibilities they often must assume in times of crisis, or the feeling that they have become burdens to their grief-stricken, overwhelmed parents. "They are so often overlooked in emergencies," said Kunera Korthals Altes, a child protection adviser with the Virginia-based aid group Christian Children's Fund.
"The greatest need right now is to follow this tsunami generation through to make them productive adults, to ensure they don't drop out of school and to make sure they're not at risk for child-trafficking," said Toni Radler, communications director of the aid group, which has launched programs geared toward children at camps such as the one in Kahawa, in the southern Galle district. "We're going to have to double and triple our efforts in this country."
In a calamity that killed more than 150,000 people, including at least 30,000 in Sri Lanka, children represented an inordinate number of those affected, both among the living and the dead.
About 40 percent of those killed were children, according to UNICEF. Too weak to battle the powerful waves or too young to know what was happening, they were dependent on adults who often lost their grips on their tiny, wet limbs.
Two weeks after the disaster, in newspapers and on tree trunks in coastal towns, relatives still post notices appealing for news about missing youngsters, evidence of the desperate hope many hold out that their children are safe in a hospital or with another family.
While such stories are heart-wrenching, it is the survivors who are of concern to relief workers eager to prevent grown-up grief from enveloping the young. With some sense of normalcy returned to their lives, and with unobtrusive monitoring by teachers trained to watch for signs of depression and extreme stress, most children should bounce back without counseling, Altes said.
Experts who have worked with children affected by traumas say fewer than 5 percent usually need intensive psychological counseling if normal activities such as school, play and household chores are put back into their lives quickly.
"It's not like 'Come lie down on the couch and tell us your problems,'" Cassandra Nelson of the aid group Mercy Corps said of the approach preferred for children. "It's through games and plays that we can get them to open up and talk about things. It's a much softer approach."
It's also an approach that may seem incongruous with survivors' dismal surroundings, and one that many adults may not consider as they struggle to pick up the remnants of their lives. "These people are worried about homes and boats and jewelry and the stuff they lost. They're not thinking about toys and games, but some people don't realize the importance of these things," Jana Nathan of the aid group CARE International said as a crowd of laughing children swarmed over a rusted slide on the grounds of a school-turned-homeless camp in the eastern province of Ampara.
Across the schoolyard, weary-looking adults lined up for handouts of clothing, soap, rice, sugar and lentils.
A young boy sat off to the side, enamored with the broken, plastic remnants of a CD jacket. He peered cheerfully through the scratched lid, his devotion to the pathetic object underscoring how little there is to keep children entertained in these camps. While food, water and clothing arrive at regular intervals, toys are nonexistent.
Nonetheless, programs to keep kids entertained and busy have been introduced in a number of camps such as the one in Kahawa, where on Friday dozens of children under the guidance of local volunteers joined hands in a large circle at their appointed 3 p.m. play time. Lacking a proper ball to kick around, they used an empty plastic bottle. In another section of the dirt yard, older children played cricket, using classroom chairs to mark off the boundaries of their imaginary playing field.
Asked to show off their pictures, giggling clusters of boys and girls crowded near the wall, pointing to their work and recalling their brushes with death in eager, childish chatter.
"I heard a loud noise like a bang, bang or something. I ran to the roadside to see the sea. We heard people shouting, 'Leave your homes and run for your lives!'" said 10-year-old Chandrika. "I can't even find the place where my home was."
Manori, a tall, thin 11-year-old, held her palm above her head to describe the depth of the water that rushed around her. She had hugged the trunk of a tree to keep from being washed away, then clambered atop a roof to safety.
Both are lucky. Their parents and siblings survived. But Piumi, 12, lost her father, a fisherman, and her trust of the sea. "It will come again," she said of the ocean. "My mother says it is going to come again."
Thilini, 11, hardly speaks except to ask why her mother couldn't hold on to her 6-year-old sister, who slipped from the woman's grasp as she fled the waves. Their story is unspeakably tragic, yet heard time and time again here: a mother trying to save her smallest child but unable to hang on to her hand.
"I could feel the child struggling. I could feel the child struggling," the mother repeated over and over as tears filled her eyes. "The second child doesn't talk," she said of Thilini. "It seems she is still in shock."
Helping such children will require months and possibly years of careful but low-key guidance, said Robert Butterworth, a psychologist with the Los Angeles-based organization International Trauma Associates, which works with survivors of quakes, wars and other calamities.
Those like Piumi may need to be slowly reacquainted with the sea, even if that means simply looking at pictures of it at first, he said. Those with more serious traumas, like Thilini, may need more hands-on assistance.
"This is incredibly time-consuming and hands-on," Butterworth said. "This is very heavy-duty stuff, and these places just don't have the manpower for that."
Experts agree that outside help in the form of counselors and teachers is crucial to help Sri Lankans take on the monumental task. So, too, is getting children back in school, a challenge in a nation where many schools are now camps for the displaced, many of whom have no idea where to go next.
Asked where she wanted to live next, Piumi was sure of just one thing: "Where there is no sea," she said.
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
January 10, 2005 Monday
Families hope against hope
BY TINA SUSMAN. STAFF WRITER
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - It is one of the saddest ironies of the tsunami that some families are holding out hope that their children were snatched up by strangers claiming them as their own, rather than lost in the sea.
Fueled by warnings of possible abductions by child smugglers taking advantage of young survivors separated from their families, and by the region's notorious reputation as a draw for pedophiles, some people are refusing to accept what might seem like the obvious: that their missing children are dead.
"Sachin was wearing a light blue T-shirt with an elephant picture printed on it," read one father's notice, posted Friday in a Colombo newspaper. "He sucks the thumb of his right arm as a habit."
"Eight-year-old Hiruni Tharushika Wanniarachchi has been missing since Dec. 26," read another, adding a piece of information that would seem to offer persuasive proof of Hiruni's demise: that she was traveling on a train headed for the southern city of Galle when the disaster struck. It has been widely reported that the train was knocked off its rails by the waves, and nearly everyone inside died.
Yet another notice came from Sudharma Wickremarachchi, the aunt of two children whose parents died. She appealed for help finding her nephews, who she had been told had been admitted to a Galle hospital, but who she said had then dropped from sight.
The American grandfather of a missing Swedish boy remains convinced the 12-year-old was taken from a hospital in southern Thailand, not killed in the tsunami, and has continued searching for him there.
There so far has been just one confirmed case of a child abduction arising from the tsunami, at a hospital in Indonesia where UNICEF officials said Saturday that a couple claiming to be parents of a 4-year-old survivor disappeared with the boy. The boy was later recovered.
Relief workers acknowledge the conditions are ripe for more abductions. "In every emergency there are always cases of child exploitation and trafficking. It's something we need to be extremely careful of," said Kunera Korthals Altes, a child protection adviser with the aid group Christian Children's Fund.
But she warned that with so many warnings and rumors flying, parents could develop false hopes that would make it impossible for them to accept their loss.
The countries hit hardest by the tsunamis have moved quickly to combat child-smuggling, by requiring guardians caring for children who have lost their parents or caretakers to register them so that other relatives can be found, and by calling on police and border guards to be on the lookout for minors accompanied by adults who are not their parents.
None of that could stop Wickremarachchi from traveling to the Galle hospital herself to try to trace her missing nephews. It was only after talking to the doctor who treated one of them, and who presented her with the child's sandal and watch, that she was convinced they both had died.
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
January 6, 2005 Thursday
For fishermen, a paralyzing fear;
Sri Lankans who pulled their livelihood from the sea will need time and counseling, but the psychological wounds may never heal
By Tina Susman
KARAITIVU, Sri Lanka - Only the crows, the dogs and the dead are left on this village's pummeled beachfront, and if the words of local fishermen are to be believed, that won't change anytime soon.
Too frightened to return to the sea, they are presenting a unique challenge to the government and to relief workers hoping to jump-start Sri Lanka's recovery from the Dec. 26 tsunami, which killed about 30,000 Sri Lankans and left survivors with a widespread phobia of the water around them.
"We have to change their attitudes," said a local government official, Vanniyasingam Vasuthevan, admitting that counseling is needed but acknowledging that there aren't enough experts in Sri Lanka to handle the problem.
Aid workers agree, saying that while emergency supplies such as food, clothing and water are arriving, psychological needs are not being met.
"We're seeing a real gap in post-trauma counseling," said Cassandra Nelson of the aid group Mercy Corps.
"To get back to normalcy will take time because psychologically, they have to get over it. Then they have to rebuild their lives," said Janardhan Salghur, an emergency relief coordinator with the aid group CARE International.
Fear is not the only mental side effect of the tsunami. So is depression, particularly among those who have lost families and livelihoods, said Nelson, adding that at least one suicide had been reported at a camp for the homeless in eastern Sri Lanka's Ampara district. Two other survivors are on a suicide watch, she said.
But the paralyzing phobia of the ocean waves could be the biggest hindrance to the revival of towns like Karaitivu, about 200 miles east of Colombo, where most heads of family are fishermen and where the Fisherman's Bank is one of the few buildings with a wall still standing. Once a town of 12,000, at least 2,200 people died. Of the 78 fishing boats that once lined the sand, 25 remain.
"Without this fishing, our lives and our families' lives will be question marks. We don't know how to live hereafter," said Nowzath, 24, who like many here uses only one name. Nowzath is not a fisherman himself, but he has a newfound fear of the sea. His father, who fishes, lost both his boats.
Like many Sri Lankans, regardless of their educational background, Nowzath, a college student, refused to be comforted by assertions that the Dec. 26 calamity was a once-in-a-lifetime quirk of nature. If it happened once, it can happen again, he insisted.
Karaitivu's palm-fringed beach, which once served as both the fishermen's place of work and their families' place of play, is now a graveyard, dotted with white flags marking locations of those still to be pulled from the endless fields of rubble.
Yesterday, the body of a baby girl was found beneath slabs of broken concrete, virtually unrecognizable except for the cloth wrapped around her tiny midsection. It was enough for one man to realize it was his 11-month-old niece.
There was no time for ceremony. The baby's body was quickly buried on a beach nearby, alongside similar graves.
In fact, the entire town resembled a graveyard, so complete was the carnage.
Not a single building appeared to have escaped unscathed, and virtually every house that sat on the beach or within a quarter-mile of it was obliterated.
A plastic skeleton, presumably salvaged from a doctor's office, dangled from a post, adding to the ghoulish atmosphere in the mournful town, where dogs rummage for food scraps.
C.S.S. Vairamuthu, a fisherman for 30 years, cried as he described watching a crow picking at the remains of one body.
"There is no way of getting into the sea again," said Vairamuthu, whose wife and four children were killed and who fears another tsunami. Asked what he would do next, he gave the answer heard so many times from Sri Lankans in similar positions: "I can't even think of the future."
As he spoke, a friend looked at the water and expressed concern at the choppy conditions, even though they did not appear out of the ordinary.
Comments such as Vairamuthu's are especially worrying to aid workers, who not only want to see Sri Lankans get back to work but also get out of the camps for tens of thousands of displaced.
With their homes destroyed and most who lived near the water insisting they won't go back, the concern is that they won't want to budge and will become increasingly dependent on assistance, slowing the country's recovery.
Already there is worry over what to do on Jan. 10, when schools are set to reopen following a midsemester break already extended because of the tsunami. Scores of schools are housing the displaced, and nobody knows where those people will go.
Relief workers say the government must provide temporary housing safely set back from the sea, follow that up with permanent housing on state land, and start enforcing laws against building too close to the water. The government has said it will enforce those long-ignored laws and relocate survivors who lived illegally close to the water.
But no matter the housing situation, survivors will need counseling and possibly training to make a living other than through fishing, said Murugesu Murugaverl of CARE, noting the mere sight of roiling waves will be too much for many to handle.
"Most of them lost their families. How can they be expected to go back and see that and restart their work?" he asked. "It's impossible."
Copyright 2005 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
January 2, 2005 Sunday
REPORT FROM SRI LANKA:
A week after the killer waves, the dead are still being discovered, while the living are in a daze
By Tina Susman
MATARA, Sri Lanka
It was noon on New Year's Day and the bridge over Nilwala Ganga, the river that empties into the sea, was packed with people peering over the edge. Below them, uniformed men wrapped plastic around the body of a woman they had dragged from the water.
Nobody recognized her. She was about 30 and clad in black shorts, blue T-shirt and a black bra. She wore a ring and a gold chain, a policeman said as she was carried away for transport to a morgue and then, most likely, the newest mass grave at Matara's cemetery.
A week after killer waves swept southern Asia, killing 28,000 in Sri Lanka, the dead are still being discovered, while the living are in a daze as they assess their staggering losses and wonder how, or if, they'll recover.
Some things have improved. The highway linking the capital, Colombo, to the devastated south was reopened yesterday, clearing the way for supplies to reach places like Matara, about 100 miles away. Locals were filling containers with water from government trucks that trundled through towns. Sacks of food and medication were stored at collection points.
But no amount of food, water or roadwork can salve the pain of those languishing in hospital wards with the memories of children swept from their arms, or lift the burden of waking each day to the sight of sheer devastation and the smell of death hidden amid the ruins.
The numbers speak for themselves. At the hospital in Galle, a three-hour drive from Colombo, 1,100 corpses were delivered on the day of the disaster alone. The hospital in Matara, another 90 minutes down the coast, took in 568 bodies that day, including those of eight foreigners.
She couldn't save her mom
Hospital officials stopped counting after that because they were too busy caring for the wounded, who included G.W. Mallika, 36, a tiny woman with two long braids and a Hello Kitty T-shirt. She survived but her mother did not, she said, fighting to keep from crying as she described how she was forced to leave the drowning woman behind. Hand in hand, Mallika and her mother, 75, battled the waves that had crashed ashore, but the older woman kept falling, dragging her daughter under the water as well.
The third time she fell, she urged Mallika to go on without her. "My mother knew she was dying, so she told my sister to save herself," said Mallika's sister Hemaranjini, 40, who had been in Colombo at the time.
"No, I can't do that!" the younger woman said, but she had no choice. The water covered her mother and sent Mallika scrambling up a wall for safety. When it receded, she tried in vain to revive the older woman until a stranger pulled her away and brought her to the hospital.
By the time Hemaranjini arrived, their mother had been buried in a mass grave. "All we want to do is have a proper memorial for her," said Hemaranjini. With their home gone, they can't even do that.
On another bed lay M.P. Chandani, 27, her right leg in a cast. She had been holding her 26-day-old son when the water rushed in and hurled her across a room in her mother's house. The baby was swept from her arms and lost in the sea. So was S.H.M. Ashroff's 3-month-old son, who was in his father's arms getting ready for a bath. His mother was warming the bathwater.
"I heard a big noise, almost like gunfire, and then the water came in. I slipped and fell and lost my grip on the baby," said Ashroff, who was swept nearly two miles. He found his wife's body in a drain behind their house. He never found his son.
"It was like a cemetery. There were bodies everywhere," Ashroff said, describing the scene after the water had receded. Like most people who lost everything, he has no clear idea what he will do next but hopes for government assistance to help him rebuild. Those are plans that can't possibly be realized until far into the future, though. For now, the effort is simply to scoop up the dead, bury them quickly, and repair washed-out roads so aid can flow through the country.
Supplies needed for shelter
At an aid coordination point in Matara, where volunteers were alerting police to reports of newly discovered bodies and handing out bandages, bottled water and other supplies, Dr. Upul Wijeratine said the most pressing need was for tarps, tents, dry rations and cooking tools. These would enable people to erect temporary shelters where they once lived and to begin clearing the rubble.
That will be a gargantuan task. Along the southern and eastern coasts, from the sand inland about a half-mile, nearly every structure has been razed, from the flimsiest of fishing shacks to posh hotels that catered to foreign visitors. Broken toilets, shattered boats and wrecked cars lie haphazardly among the ruins of homes, which look like they were smashed by wrecking balls.
On the porch of one home, stuffed animals and dolls had been lined up and seemed to lean wearily against one another. Amid the ruins of a once-chic hotel was the evidence of a vacation's horrifying end: dead fish lying outside trashed guestrooms, soggy Sri Lanka guidebooks and novels intended for long days on the beach strewn on the ground along with swim trunks, sandals and packets of anti-malarial pills. The water line in the rooms was about 8 feet high.
Many Sri Lankans are afraid now to live close to the sea. Wijesiri Wickremasinghe, 40, saved his 11-year-old son from drowning and nearly drowned himself. Now, they are staying in a church in Galle. "I don't want to die again," he said, explaining that even though his house was not destroyed, he doesn't trust the sea enough to go back.
Copyright 2004 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday (New York)
December 30, 2004 Thursday
Devastation so total, survival holds no joy;
Where an idyllic fishing village once stood, there now seems to be not one house inhabitable
By Tina Susman
TELWATTA, Sri Lanka
The last time M.G. Wejetunge spoke to his daughter, she had telephoned him from a stalled train and urged him not to be concerned. The water was not too high, 25-year-old Lanka Chandima told him Sunday as she sat in the carriage watching the sea slosh around her knees.
"She told me don't fear: We are stuck here, but the water is going down," Wejetunge said yesterday, repeating the phrase word for word and with a fierce intensity, as if that would somehow make it true. But that was the last time he spoke to Lanka Chandima.
Yesterday, after three days of searching, he finally found her body, one of hundreds - some say thousands - so far pulled from the ruins of the 10-car train that was swept off the tracks during Sunday's earthquake-driven tsunami.
"My only daughter," Wejetunge said sadly as he stood beside her corpse, which lay on the ground next to him. Covered to the knees by a white sheet, only her bare feet and the embroidered edges of her faded blue jeans were visible. Wejetunge described a vibrant young woman who was looking forward to spending New Year's with a friend in the southern beach town of Galle and who loved to chatter on her cell phone, the same one she used in their last conversation.
For a country that lost more than 22,000 people in this week's calamity, few towns seem to have suffered as much as Telwatta, a onetime idyllic fishing village about 55 miles south of Colombo, the capital. Not only did the train get washed off its tracks here, leaving carriages filled with corpses strewn haphazardly across the landscape, but virtually every house appears to have been destroyed or irrevocably damaged. Walking among the dazed survivors, it is hard to find anyone who hasn't lost someone.
One man volunteered that he had lost his aunt and a brother, but he felt relatively fortunate.
"That house, they lost a mother, son and a daughter," he said, indicating a pile of concrete that looked nothing like a house.
"I've only got the clothes I'm wearing," said a woman, Chandra Malane Appuwahandi, indicating her shabby skirt and a shirt held together with pins instead of buttons.
W.T. Prema Ranjith lost the friend he had gone down to the beach to meet Sunday.
"I grabbed a tree branch when the water came, but the branch broke and took me away," he said. "I never saw what happened to my friend."
So powerful was the stench of death that everyone clasped handkerchiefs to their noses as they meandered through the ruins. Yesterday, beneath the tall palm trees lining the once-welcoming beach, yet another mass grave was being filled with unidentified bodies from the train wreck, the second one for those victims in two days. Police were rushing to bury the bodies, fearing the smell would become unbearable and disease would begin to spread.
Onlookers peered into the hole and shook their heads to indicate they didn't see anyone they recognized. Most of the victims were like Lanka Chandima - out-of-towners passing through - and few had relatives who had been able to get here to claim them, dooming them to burial in a huge, anonymous grave.
"The sea gives so many things, but in this moment, it took everything away," said S.M. Udaya, 28, who was clearing sodden debris from the remains of his family's lemon-yellow house, about 200 feet from the nearest wrecked train car. It's the house he has always lived in and the one his 75-year-old father built from money earned as a fisherman. When the waves rushed in, Udaya was safe in another village, farther from the sea.
Relatives told Udaya his mother had run toward higher ground. His father had grabbed the hand of Udaya's sister, Champa, 35, and had fled around the back of the house, but the current had been too strong. He had lost his grip, and Champa had disappeared. So had Udaya's brother, Adith, 33, who had been on a bus running along the beachfront highway.
Now, Udaya said the remaining family would look for land elsewhere and build a new home.
All around him, the town looked as if it had been attacked by a giant rolling pin. Great swaths of land were blanketed by chunks of concrete. Neither stairs, doorways, nor porches remained standing. So complete was the devastation that the rare objects not crushed to oblivion were startlingly obvious: a framed wedding photograph placed carefully atop a pile of cement; a sewing machine; a bright orange statue of Buddha perched in front of a wrecked home; and of course the hulking train carriages, which from a distance looked almost like low-slung apartment blocks rising from the greenery.
A few hundred feet away, as afternoon clouds rolled in and rain began to fall, a bulldozer went to work covering the latest mass grave.
In 2005, the Indonesian tsunami, a two-month pregnant woman and her husband were rolls into the sea together, they are fortunate to be holding a large tree floating in the sea. They all hungry, the husband Masood collect some coconuts and other tropical fruits floating around on the see, and then use clothes tying them on the tree they hold.He just let his wife eat fruits alone ,while he strived for hungery . However, the wife insist on eating fruits at the same time, or she would hunger strike. Her husband know that the food was scarce, if two people eat together,they conld’t stay for long. The fourth day, the fruits were less and less , in order to let his pregnant wife to stay live, reducing food consumption, the husband pleaed his wife to insist and wait for rescue personnel.Then the husband give up the chance of survival, submerged by the sea. The five day, rescue personnel found his wife Saigeitay who was floating on the sea. doctors give her full examination,inconceivability, fetus was normal.
Posted by: jams | December 13, 2007 at 09:55 AM