After the Tsunami
Mother Nature can be a vicious Auld Hoor! We are going through grim times in Sri Lanka. Many are reminded of the St Stephen’s Day Tsunami of 2004.
Just outside Hambantota,
Plastic chairs stranded
Above the stained lagoons
Of the Lanka Salt Company.
Corpses taint salt and fish.
A graveyard trashed with broken trees.
A large dead bat
Hanging from telephone wires.
A canal clogged
With orphaned furniture.
A child’s dress swaying
From the ceiling
In the shell of a house.
Walls of empty houses tattooed
With telephone numbers.
Photos of the missing
Stuck to trees.
Many houses were illegal,
So records failed to account
For the lost.
Young masked men carried spades;
Girls dispensed tea and biscuits
Soldiers and police
Carried boxes of food and water.
An Irish NGO distributed bicycles.
Cargill’s supermarket was boarded up
On our first visit
And disappeared on our second.
The sign on the Jade Green Restaurant
Dangled and clanged
Above holes in the walls.
Crushed three-wheelers littered the verges.
Strange reversals:
A bus nose-down in the sea;
Boats marooned in the main street,
Stacked against a mosque.
A mangled telecoms tower
Jutted from the sea.
Saris hung, strange fruit,
High in the battered trees.
Small slippers sat
In the middle of back lanes.
There was mud everywhere
And it was as if the earth,
Rotting from within,
Exhaled halitosis.
Scrawny dogs patrolled
The wreckage.
Scare stories spread
Of desperate dogs
Prowling the night,
Biting the living
And eating the dead.
Christian friends said the tsunami
Was God’s judgement
On a pagan Buddhist nation.
We distributed provisions
At a Buddhist temple
But it was an ecumenical event.
Many were Muslims.
Some were Christians.
Some were Hindus.
People were united in adversity.
Nature had not discriminated.
The first arrivals were calm and measured;
Gradually new arrivals were more hurried,
Breathless, their lateness a sign
Of having travelled a greater distance
Than the first-comers. Soon our supplies were gone.
The late-comers did have a look of panic.
They did show disappointment,
But with resignation rather than anger.
One man said his wife,
A teacher, had gone to market with their child.
They did not return.
A woman could not control her tears
As she told about losing her husband in the flood.
One woman claimed to have lost 30 of her family.
All behaved with dignity
But said they had lost their dignity.
“We were not rich but we were comfortable.
We had a good life.
Now we have nothing.
We are just like beggars.”
The wave engulfed the holiday train,
Queen of the South,
At Peraliya, taking 2,500.
A fading poem from a husband
To his lost wife written
On the side of one rusting carriage:
“Did the children and I come to you when the waves came?
Were the kids there with you when death came?
In eternity, do you want to be mine again?
Will you come back at least in my dreams?”
By our third visit to Hambantota,
The miasmic odour had gone.
Some tents belonged to house-owners
Camping outside their own houses.
A neat sign in magic-marker,
In an empty plot at the junction,
Said “Ayub Khan 348 Tissa Road, Hambantota”
To stake a claim against squatters.
A gathering of orange-robed priests
Sat under a battered sign:
“Baby’s Dream Pre-school”.
Some broken houses were festooned
With washing and had goats
And chickens in the yard.