By Amantha Perera
POLHENA, Nov 3 2005 (IPS)

This tourist destination, famed for its golden beaches, has regained some of the splendour lost when the Dec. 26 tsunami turned the limpid waters into a mass grave.

Beach vendors are back and so are the snorkelers and the tourists. A newly constructed public rest room and a life guard tower funded by the Korean government are the star attractions on the beach.

Strolling by the pool-like calm sea, it is difficult to imagine that the tsunami had even happened.

But, beyond the excited shouts of visitors dipping in the shallow waters, Polhena’s people are still struggling to cope with the aftermath of the catastrophe which left 35,000 people dead and wrought untold destruction on the coasts of this island country.

”People are coming here, but they don’t stay longà they leave very soon,” said Manuwelmadu Chandana at the Polhena Beach Hotel, staring at the parked buses on the beach. He was at the hotel when the waves struck and saw the manager die.

”If the sea is rough or there is a high wind, people leave very fast. It’s understandable, we are also scared,” Chandana said. Recently, when rumours spread of an impending tsunami, they removed all the valuables to the first floor of the hotel and closed shop.

Hidden by the hotel’s newly painted walls and the signboards lie mounts of debris and the tattered tents and wooden shacks set up over the foundations of destroyed buildings.

Fear and confusion are written all over M.A. Nandawathie’s face as she leans on the wooden door of her shack and describes the indifferent reconstruction effort. ”No one (from the government) has come and spoken to us, we don’t know where or how we are going to live,” she said.

Her destroyed house is located within the 100 metre no-build buffer zone the government declared soon after the tsunami and then narrowed down to 30 metres mainly as a result of intervention by former US President Bill Clinton who toured the affected areas in May as the UN Special Tsunami Envoy.

Due to the original ban and a slow moving reconstruction effort, Nandawathie’s wait for some authority to inform her where and how she could relocate has entered its eleventh month.

Nandawathie was completely unaware that the government had rescinded the zoning rule recently and reduced it to 30 metres. ”I don’t know, no one has told us,” she told IPS.

In fact, a photo-copied letter pasted on a store-front close to Nandawathie’s destroyed house talks of a 300 metre-green belt beyond the buffer zone. Released by the Coast Conservation Department in Colombo, 150 km away, it warned that unauthorised constructions within 200 metres of the belt would be torn down.

Nandawathie, who lost her husband in the tsunami, and others have patiently waited for the government to ease their plight, while many have gone ahead to reconstruct their businesses and houses along the beach ûignoring the zoning laws.

”I can’t leave here, this is where I make a living,” M.I. Wimalasena, who runs a row of bath-showers close to the beach, said. Even if the government had stuck to its original zoning rule, it would have been difficult to dislodge people like Wimalasena who depend on proximity to the beach to make a living.

”The government should allow the people to build where they want, and help them, not stop them,” said Magamuwe Sri Pannyatissa Thero, the chief monk at the Polhena Buddhist temple.

Fortunately for Nandawathie, she still owns the plot of land her house stood on. Her neighbours sold off their land at dirt cheap prices to a hotel developer amidst the confusion created by the zoning laws that seem to be moving in and out with the political tide.

The government is focusing on the presidential election due on Nov. 17. Despite all the touted reconstruction efforts, so far, only 385 houses of the 49,233 destroyed within the original buffer zone have been handed over.

Villagers in Polhena point to the new rest room constructed with Korean funds as an example of government lethargy. It is complete and ready to welcome visitors, but government bungling over tender prices has delayed the opening indefinitely.

At an election rally for Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the government’s presidential candidate close to Polhena, speakers left out the tsunami reconstruction effort in their speeches and concentrated on vilifying opponents.

Rajapakse’s main challenger, opposition leader Ranil Wickreamasinghe, has pledged to do away with the buffer zone and complete the housing reconstruction effort within six months. However, many of the tsunami victims are reluctant believe in the rhetoric.

While the long wait continues along the devastated coast, the effects of the tsunami are reaching right into the heart of the social fabric.

Children relocated to new schools complain that they are jeered at in school and resist attending classes. ”It is very hard to study in my new school. We are made fun of. We are called the tsunami children,” ten-year-old Ishani Lakshika, orphaned by the tsunami, said. She walks two hours every day back and forth from her new school.

While she and her aunt remain at their destroyed house during the day, they move to a relative’s house further away from the coast at night for fear of some new calamity.

”There was a time when we used to listen to the sound of the ocean when we went to sleep-now every time a big wave breaks, we shudder,” Nandawathie said.

The fear is such that she wants to move away from the beach, but any chance of moving now is minimal with the changes to the zone. Her house now lies outside the new no-construction zone.

”I don’t know what to do. This is what I built with my husband and he died in the tsunami here, there is so much pain. I want to go away from here but I can’t,” Nandawathie said.

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