Friday, April 17, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
TSUNAMI IMPACT: Sri Lankans Ask ‘Where Do We Begin?’
Marwaan Macan-Markar
- Mohamad Nawaz’s eyes brim with tears as he stares at the wreck that was once his four-roomed home a short walk from the beach of this fishing village on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. What was once his furniture is scattered nearby. A damp stench hangs in the air.
On either side of Nawaz’s home is a landscape of ruined houses, some without roofs and walls, some a crumpled heap of wooden planks and a few bricks over cracked cement floors.
Other men, like 34-year-old Mohamed Rilwan, also stagger through the mounds of debris in search of clothes that were once part of his life.
For Nawaz, a 40-year-old teacher at a technical education school in Weligama, the challenge of rebuilding a world that was devastated by the force of a turbulent sea on the morning of Dec. 26 appears daunting. ”Where to begin?” he asks in slow, measured tone.
That sense of despair is amplified at the makeshift shelter that passes for his home in the compound of this village’s largest mosque. There, Nawaz, his wife and two children have been living the life of refugees along with 175 other families for over a week. Two thirds of the families are Muslims from his neighbourhood, while the rest are Sinhalese.
These families are among the over one million tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka, whose lives were spared when killer waves on the day after Christmas – spawned from an undersea quake in Indonesia’s northernmost tip – devastated a dozen or so countries in the Indian Ocean killing over 140,000 people.
Sri Lanka’s death toll from that tidal surge has already reached 30,196 – a number that is expected to rise given the nearly 4,000 people still missing.
Nawaz and his family escaped by climbing on to the roof of a house across the street. Not so fortunate were six of his relatives, the youngest of whom was a cousin’s baby, barely a year old. ”They were swallowed by the sea,” he says, looking into the distance.
Yet for survivors like Nawaz, the urge to rebuild their shattered lives has to give way to something more pressing – the struggle to get food, clean water and medical care. Over a week after the tsunami struck there is still a sense of unease in Weligama’s newly mushrooming refugee camps, about when the next meal will be and from where.
It is a reality that is echoed across the many temples, mosques, churches and schools offering shelter to refugees from the flatenned coastline. And there is little mystery behind such a sense of uncertainty: the devastation has proved to be overwhelming for the government of this largely poor South Asian island.
”The country is not geared to handle devastation on this scale,” says Dhammika Hewapathirana, manager of the Centre for National Operations – a body set up by the government three days after the catastrophe to coordinate relief efforts.
”We are handicapped by a lack of a field force to physically go to devastated areas to assess the needs of the hour. There is also a problem with limited transportation to take aid to the victims,” he tells IPS.
But the week that exposed the weakness of the Sri Lankan state to respond to such a formidable challenge has also given rise to a slice of this country’s spirit that has proved a saviour – the unprecedented outpouring of goodwill by individuals moved to do something, anything, to help victims of the post Christmas disaster.
Such compassion to step in with aid ahead of government and international initiatives has been led by television stations and newspapers, university students and youth groups, industrialists and entrepreneurs, religious bodies, women’s groups and even the country’s poorest citizens – the slum dwellers in the capital Colombo.
All week, the roads that snake through the landscape where the tsunami left a trail of wrecked communities have been clogged by trucks and vans full of dry rations, cooked food, water and clothes on such independent missions of mercy.
”This public support to aid the victims was beyond what we have seen during other disasters before,” Bandula Jayasekera, spokesman for the South Asia office of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent, told IPS. ”Such volunteer spirit from individuals and local communities has been very crucial. If not, the survivors could have suffered more during the first few days.”
Typical among such Sri Lankans is Hilmiya Junaid, a 60-year-old mother of five.
The morning after the tsunami struck, she transformed her spacious home in Galle, a town rich in Dutch colonial history that was also flayed by the rampaging sea, into a nerve center to distribute emergency relief to survivors in the area – some 115 kilometers south of Colombo, and Weligama, 30 kilometers south-east of Galle.
On Saturday morning, nearly 20 volunteers gathered at her home to prepare packages that contained vegetables such as beans, tomatoes, capsicum chilies, slices of salted and dried fish and onions.
”We cannot sit back after disaster has struck like this,” said Junaid, who lost two neighbours to the killer waves.
Like Junaid, Haroun Cader has also answered the call to show solidarity with humanity.
The 35-year-old executive of a Colombo-based company that sells adhesives put aside all his commitments as marketing director of Sinwa Holdings to join a relief effort spearheaded by other young executives from the country’s commercial sector.
”Many people volunteered to give their time and money for this initiative,” said Cader, who is taking on the role of an aid worker for the first time in his life.
The informal network they have built to supply food and water from the markets of Colombo to the refugee camps in southern Sri Lanka has assisted close to 3,000 people.
Among them is Nawaz, the teacher from Weligama struggling to come to terms with his life without a home and without the security of regular meals that he was accustomed to.
”Now we are like beggars; dependent on others for food,” he says. ”We can’t do anything but wait for these people to bring it to us.”
Print
|
