When the Sea Stood Up
by Michael Slate
Revolution #006, June 19, 2005, posted at revcom.us
It was incredibly quiet, serene actually, as we drove along the coast through Matara and headed on around to Hambantota on the southeastern rim of the island just as it begins to turn north. The road stretches alongside some really beautiful beaches. The seas are calm and unimaginably blue. The waves are small and rhythmic, soothing in their repetition as they quietly and softly roll ashore.
Somewhere between the town of Tangalle and Hambantota, the weather zone shifts from wet to dry. Much of the coastline here is shielded from monsoons, and seas are good for fishing almost all year round.
Hambantota is often described as a bustling town with little to offer visitors. It's close to some national parks, but for most tourists its biggest claim to fame is that Leonard Woolf, husband of writer Virginia Woolf, was the British government agent here in 1908 and wrote about the town in his book A Village in the Jungle. Aside from fishing, the other main industry in the town is salt production carried out by the ancient method of evaporating sea water in salt pans.
A week earlier we had lunch with a couple of tsunami volunteers from L.A. Their families are Sri Lankan immigrants now settled in southern California. They had arrived in Sri Lanka in early January and had done volunteer gigs all along the southern coast. They were filled with stories of what they had seen and what they had learned— including many stories about government corruption and dishonesty woven in and out of the relief aid distribution efforts. They described Hambantota as the worst-hit spot they had come across. They would say no more, simply telling us we had to visit the town and see for ourselves.
The people in Hambantota are mostly Muslim. As we sat in the middle of a large expanse of dirt littered with broken rock and coconut shells, the noon prayers chanted over a loudspeaker in a nearby mosque were the only sign that we had arrived in Hambantota. The entire town—except for a few semi-wrecked buildings, a couple of ragged ruins and a few dozen scattered wooden huts and tents made of heavy white canvas—was gone, completely destroyed and washed away in the tsunami.
Most of the ruins left in the wake of the tsunami were bulldozed down and plowed under by the government within a few days of the tsunami. So all that was left was this huge dirt field. A few dozen men sought shade under the coconut trees scattered along the beach.
As we tried to understand what it must have been like in Hambantota when the tsunami hit, a man with an angry gash on his left leg pedaled up on an old bicycle. His name was Jabari, born and raised in Hambantota.
"I am 40 years old and I have been a fisherman for 22 years now. I have a small catamaran and that's how I make my livelihood. On the day of the tsunami I had gone out to sea. I was gone the whole night and had just come back. I was at my mother's and had just taken a wash when the tsunami hit. About 8:30 I was playing with my sister's kids and some of the kids in the neighborhood. Then about 9:15 there was a gush of water coming towards us. I came out and looked and there was a huge sound which I can not describe. With the sound came a whole wave of water that went above us. It drowned us. Then I got washed away. I was carrying a four-year-old child. Then a wall crumbled and buried me and I lost this child. Altogether we lost five children in my extended family. I lost my own four-month- old child. I found my child's body in Colombo at the Borella morgue."
Jabari stopped talking for a moment. The noontime prayers from the mosque were the only sound to be heard. His eyes welled with tears and his voice cracked as he continued.
"Before the tsunami there were very good buildings on both sides of the road there. There were some shops and double-story homes. People had worked very hard all their life to build up their homes. This was a fairly prosperous place. There were maybe about 10 commercial establishments like guest houses and hotels and about 400 homes.
"The government says that about 4,500 people lost their lives here. But that was the village fair day [a farmers' market], and you would have close to 5,000 people here. And then if you take the people in their homes and total it up there would be over 7,000 people killed, not less."
Jabari pointed to what remained of a low stone structure.
"The village fair was conducted along this stretch of coastal land, and all of that was washed away. And 90% of the people who were at the fair were washed away. Many of the 10% who survived were wounded."
Hambantota depended entirely on the sea for its existence. Fishing and salt production —that was what had kept the vast majority of people alive for more than a century. When the sea turned on them, it not only killed thousands of people but destroyed the main source of survival for many thousands more. Pointing to a mid-size boat that sat in the middle of the field like it had been dropped from the sky, Jabari went on.
"That boat there was anchored at sea and the tsunami just picked it up and brought it ashore. There were about 400 fishing boats here and all of them were destroyed. Some were completely taken away, washed away by the tsunami, and others were broken into two or three pieces. I have not been able to get back to the sea or have any kind of livelihood since the tsunami. Several offices have been established here to supposedly help the people. I have gone to them and told them that if they could give me some equipment then I can find a catamaran and I will get my life back and I will look after my mother. But up to today no one has done anything for me to help me resume my livelihood.
"My house was located where inland water came to the sea. There was a sort of big canal there and this is where the water came the most fiercely. My house was razed to the ground—not even a brick remains. Even the foundation is hard to recognize. When the water came it went over our heads and we were all swept away, so we don't really know how high it went. But we know that we were swept away. When my sister's daughter was screaming `Uncle, uncle, please help me,' I couldn't get to her because the water was so violent and swirling. I have never seen anything so forceful or violent in my life.
"When I came here and saw what happened I didn't know what to do. I just sat here and cried. I thought everybody was gone. Then somebody came up and told me that my mother and some of the elder people are there, but the children are all gone. They told me to go and look for the children and that's what I did."
Like most of the survivors in Hambantota, Jabari is still not very clear about what exactly happened, what exactly a tsunami is, why it happened, or why it caused so much destruction, death and pain. But, again like many others in his town, the desperate sadness in Jabari's voice is quickly replaced with anger—especially when he talks about the Sri Lankan government and how it treats the people.
"Look, the tsunami hit Trincomalee [upper northeast part of the island] at about 7:30 in the morning and there are all kinds of equipment there—the Navy, Armed Forces, all kinds of communications, they have it all. It came here about 9:30 and Galle about 10 so they could have easily sent an alarm. But evidently the government officials were not doing their duty. Government bureaucracy as a whole, they only pass laws against the people. But they enjoy all the freedom in the sense of privileges. And they have no sense of working or sense of duty.
"All these acres of land here, it was all houses and all close together with the children's park right there. This has all been destroyed and devastated. And the government came next and flattened all this. They want a harbor here. They say it's safe to have a harbor within 100 meters of here, but it's not safe to have a house here. The government has been trying to acquire this land for about two or three years now, and the people have resisted, saying these are our homes, this is where we were born, and we are not going away. So the government took the opportunity right after the tsunami to just grab it. Less than four days after the tsunami they came and bulldozed everything. Even the walls that remained or whatever, they just bulldozed it and didn't even bother to see if there were corpses."
As I spoke with Jabari, another man approached us and stood waiting for the conversation to end. His name was Saboor, and his shy smile was in stark contrast with his intense and anxious eyes. He took my arm and began to walk me across the field towards a white tent, all the while explaining,
"You can't live here, can't breathe. It is too hot! If we can't stay here then how do you expect infants and children to stay here?
"My hut was here but I was in the town when the tsunami hit. From the town I just saw some little bit of disturbance, some waves coming up. And then suddenly it came into a big wave and went into the town, washed over everything in the town and took it away. And all of our boats were taken away by the sea. Then the sea receded and we went after our boats, to try to recover our boats. And then we could see that the wave was coming back. I came over to where the village fair was because that was the area where we all lived. Everything was washed away by the time I got here, including my house. So this was just a wasteland. I lost 14 people in my family—my wife, my three daughters, my mother, my sister and her children. We looked for their bodies for two days, but we could only find the body of my mother."
We arrived at Saboor's tent. He challenged us to come in and see how long we could take the noontime heat. Inside his tent was a sand floor and two mosquito coils. He had nothing else but the clothes on his back. Everything was taken by the tsunami. The heat in the tent was almost visible—the air seemed to have a wavy appearance. I think we lasted about three or four minutes inside the tent—it was impossible to breathe, it felt like your lungs were collapsing. Our clothes were soaked and our eyes were burning from dripping sweat. This was the "relief" offered to Saboor and so many others left homeless after the tsunami all over Sri Lanka.
The outside temperature was in the upper 90s, but when we stepped outside the tent it was like we walked into a refreshing cool breeze. Saboor shook his head and said,
"It is only at night that I come here to this tent. Sometimes our friends come here, but all we can do is sleep here. What else can we do?"
Saboor walked us over to a coconut tree grove where a group of his friends relaxed in the shade. Kannan, a tall, thin man in his early thirties wearing a Chicago White Sox hat, invited us to sit with them. He laughed when Saboor told the group how long we were able to stay inside the tent. Then he said,
"It is very, very sad that we all have to live like this now. We all had a sense of dignity and we all lived well. We were not living off of anybody. We earned our way, we earned our life. We lived in fairly good homes. But suddenly now we are reduced to living in tents. And it is burning inside there, you can't stay inside there for more than five minutes. We get beaten by the sun—and then we get beaten by the rains and all the water comes into the tents.
"We feel that we are being played with because they bring in this 100-meters buffer zone rule [a law the government has been trying to enforce along the coastline in the wake of the tsunami that forbids people to live within 100 meters of the ocean]. And we don't know if we should come back and build new houses. We don't have any other land, this is our title land. We own this land. But then suddenly the Prime Minister comes here and says that this is forbidden territory and says we can't build here because it would be against the law. Well, if it is against the law, then take over the land and build us up alternative homes—but not five kilometers away. They must have a practical plan and a solution."
We left Saboor and his friends and walked across the dirt field to the beach and down towards the ocean. The sea was really beautiful that day—calm, quiet, bright blue and really inviting. There were a few fishing boats bobbing on the horizon. But as inviting as the sea seemed on a day as hot as it was, no one went anywhere near it. There had been rumors that the full moon exactly three months after the tsunami would bring another tsunami, and people were scared.
As one old man explained to me,
"We never even heard this word before. We had no idea what it was or what it could do to us, how much pain and suffering it could bring us. Now we know but what can we do. No one tells us anything. So we hear the water will rise tomorrow night and perhaps it will be a new tsunami. We won't stay here for that."
Walking across the dirt field meant stepping on the shards of people's lives. A child's broken toy, water-stained photo albums, an old school assignment book with barely visible ink writing across the wrinkled sun-dried pages, smashed videocassettes and even old pants and broken dinner plates littered the area. A few bright red or blue staircases swirled up towards the sky but led nowhere. Only the faintest traces of housing foundations were all that remained of most of Hambantota.
As we walked a man approached and showed us pictures on his cell phone. In very broken English he explained,
"This is my family—my father's family, my mother's family—it is 60 people dead. I lost everyone, my father, my mother, four brothers. I was going to the mosque on December... and then going to the salt corporation. I got a message at 9:20 that the tsunami has hit my area. My mother was dead, my house was gone."
In an unbearably sad voice he explained that the photos on his cell phone were all he had left of his family. He kept that phone on a long necklace around his neck and tucked safely into his breast pocket.
As we stood at the edge of the ocean a young Muslim girl talked with us about losing her family and her home. A small group of men stood nearby and watched the conversation. It was clear they were safeguarding her. The girl was 15 and she was irrepressible. After the tsunami she went to live with her cousins and two surviving brothers. She introduced us to her cousin Sadiq, a short, thin 25-year-old man who quickly advised us to move into the shade if we wanted to continue the conversation.
"I am a fisherman. On the...th, in the morning time I went to sea and came back at 8 o'clock. I went home at 8:45 and stayed there. Then after 9:15 I came out from the house and was standing on the sea- side of the house and casting my net for fish. Then I thought, why is the sea standing? I never thought this could happen. This never happened before. So I ran to my house and told my father that the sea is coming to us and that we cannot stay and we must go. After we went, the sea was very high power and it came to us and it smashed all things, the walls and the trees. All of that was broken. My father and mother all got caught in that water. I escaped from the sea. I ran for one kilometer to escape. Then after the tsunami went down, I came back to see the dead bodies of my parents. I found my home broken and people's bodies around it. I buried in the mosque five bodies.
"After that I had no place to stay so now I am staying in friends' houses. I am trying to find a house some other place. They are trying to put us on the jungle side, but I don't like to go there because I am a fisherman. I accept that I can build a house on the place where I lost my house. If I am there then I can go to sea again. I had a boat and canoes, and I lost everything. My boat had everything in it, and if I get this replaced then I can go back to sea. Now it is three months that I didn't go to sea because I don't have the things I need to go to sea.
"So I am living day by day. I have no alternative. Until I get a solution from the government or from others I have to survive. Until then I can only survive."