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Most certainly all of you have seen the many reports with pictures showing the devastation, destruction and death. In actuality it is worse. The pictures do not convey the persistent smell of death that engulfs the entire area. Two days after the catastrophe we ran into several groups of reporters who just had arrived from the US and Europe. We knew then that the flow of reports to the rest of the world would increase dramatically. And, so it has. As always the events may subside but the news coverage will increase; after all, the reporters came to report! The catastrophe has now entered into the looting stage where pilferage is dominant. It reminds me of some of the looting scenes during the Watts riots in Los Angeles. I do not know whether it will be reported outside of this country by the media. It is reality and shows some of the worst side of humanity. It is a gruesome reality to those who lost all they ever owned and are starving when the donated food enters the black market rather than feeds the hungry! Perhaps things will get better, when the 1,400 US Marines land at Galle in three days.
Most of the destruction in Sri Lanka took place within a few hundred yards from the beaches. The destruction only expanded into the country in the north and the east where there is a lot of flat land. The city of Colombo suffered hardly any damage at all. The economically most important harbor was back in full operation within 24 hours. Our apartment is about four miles as the crow flies from the beach and there was no damage at all. This last sentence does not mean that we already had an idea about the dangers lurking on the beach in early October 2004 when we arrived in Sri Lanka. To the contrary we were looking for a place to rent on the beach, however, we could not find anything suitable for the time period we needed. So by default we settled in a safe area.
Until December 15, 2004 the hotels offered special low rates to residents, which we are, since, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar we were given permanent resident visas. After the 15th of December the tourists came in force, mostly from Europe, and the prices more than doubled. If you stayed in the same room and received the same service for one third of the price, it is hard to adjust to paying full price! Until then we spent consistently every weekend at the beach in hotels that are now no more. However, the main reason we did not go to the beach on the Christmas weekend was that we were invited to a Christmas dinner by a colleague from the Kelaniya University.
The damage to the beach area was aggravated by the geographical fact that Sri Lanka lies between approximately 6 degrees north and 10 degrees north and is therefore fairly safe from hurricane type (known as typhoons in this neck of the woods) storms. There hardly are any hurricane type winds ever between 10 degrees South and 10 degrees north latitude around the equator. So if there is a wind, it is local and mostly a monsoon type with lots of rain but not the high winds that cause high waves. Accordingly, they sometimes build houses and shacks literally to the water's edge. Anybody in those houses and shacks had no chance at all when the tsunami wave hit. The British, the colonial masters of Sri Lanka until 1948, built a railroad between Colombo and Galle, about 75 miles distance. At some places the railroad track is barely six feet above the ocean level and within twenty feet from the waters edge. The shacks were built within six feet from the track between the track and the ocean. The 9.0 (Richter scale) earthquakes occurred at 6:58 A.M. some 800 miles from Sri Lanka, off the coast of Sumatra. When the first tsunami wave hit Sri Lanka at 9:10 A.M. (it only took 2 hours and ten minutes) it swept away all the shacks, the full train (over 1,000 people) hotels restaurants and even solidly built houses. There were very few survivors.
A sad side observation. Before the destructive wave hits, the tsunami actually sucks the water off the beach and the children ran out on the beach and collected stranded fish. Within less than five minutes the big wave then rolled in and very few of the children survived. Amazingly almost none of the elephants were caught by the tsunami. It appears the animal sensed the coming disaster and ran away from the beach! Of course, as was reported, the first big wave was followed by a number of smaller almost equally destructive waves.
On December 29, 2004 (Wednesday) we were contacted at about 4:00 AM by some long time friends of ours from Austria. They were looking for their Swiss friends who were staying at a hotel (Villa Lotos) about 40 km north of Galle towards Colombo for an Ayurveda treatment. He is a professor at the university in Frankfurt, Germany and she is a stage actress. Our friends could not reach them by telephone or otherwise. We immediately started to search for information. The hotel is no more. Before we obtained any results from our efforts we received an email five hours later at 9:27 A.M., EST. informing us to call off the search. Their friends had been found back at home in Basel again. After being swept into the ocean and swimming next to their dead hotel breakfast table partner, they managed to get out of the water in swim suits. That is all they had left. Local Sri Lankans gave them a shirt and some slippers. They were treated at an inland hospital for their wounds and received a tetanus shot. After they managed to get to Colombo, the Swiss Embassy had them both dressed and sent them promptly back to Switzerland. The Swiss administration works like their proverbial Swiss watches!
This time of the year should have been a happy time, people enjoying Christmas with their family and friends and celebrating the arrival of the New Year, hopefully a more peaceful one than the last two years. This is not happening now. People here are saddened by the deaths of thousands of their country men and quite a few foreigners. At this writing the death toll has reached in Sri Lanka alone almost 30,000. Probably a million people out of a total population of twenty million have lost their homes. Yet, out of all of this tragedy there appears to be developing a deep concern for their brother Sri Lankans regardless of religious faith, ethnicity, caste or location. The typical abrasive political attacks are more subdued and the volume of barbs has significantly been reduced. The question is: Will it last?
The name "January" comes from the Roman god Janus, the god with two faces, one looking to the past and the other looking to the future. While we look with sadness at the year that just ended, let us look forward to the New Year ahead of us with the hope for peace.
A few hours ago while on the internet I came across a review put out by the AP wire service entitled: "Philharmonic Opens with Somber Undertones", discussing the performance of the New York Philharmonic of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on December 31, 2004, in New York. The orchestra was conducted by the famous German conductor Kurt Masur and it was dedicated to the victims of the earthquake and the tsunami in South Asia. The program provided names of charities accepting gifts for the survivors of this tragedy. According to the author of the review, Verena Dobnik, this must have been one of those rare, perfect and epochal performances of that most famous composition by the most famous German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. The lyrics in the final chorus are from the 18th century German poet Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy and they mean: "All men will become brothers." It is most appropriate for the tragedy and the hope the survivors need. Some of you will recall that the American conductor Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth by the fallen Berlin Wall in 1989 signaling Europe's new freedom. While writing this report I am listening to the masterful recording of the Ninth by the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Herbert von Karajan.
Herta M. Keilbach, PhD.