This is a letter passed on to me by a friend from Sri Lanka about first hand events that happened.
To help the victims there please visit : Aid Sri Lanka
Dec. 29th, 2004
On Sunday the 26th when the Tsunami hit our region, Mat and I were out in a beach resort with his frieds from office. we got to see first hand the disaster that hit our country and the many other countries surrounding us.
We got to the hotel a little after 9 a.m. – it was a beautiful sunny day and people were laying out sunbathing and swimming and the sea was calm. the hotel was shaped somewhat like a horse shoe and faced the sea. The room we were given to change in was on one of the wings which was closer to the sea. Mat and the guys got changed into thier swim wear first and then us girls were supposed to get changed, but before we even started using the room the guys who had now gone on to the beach starting calling to us to come out and see how the sea seemed to be spilling over into the hotel grounds and into the romms and main hotel.
The water was moving quite slowly so though it seemed like a freak tide and was quite unusual people weren’t too worried; well the men weren’t at least though us women somehow sensed something was up and we kept watch on the second floor while the men were downstairs helping the hotel clean up some and then they got in the pool (us women were quite annoyed with our men by this point). Then while we were watching the sea level started to drop and the reef started to surface, there was somehting like a muddy whirl pool starting to form just behind the reef. We started calling out to our men folk who were still playing water polo in the pool, but from downstairs one couldn’t see the gravity of the situation. When the water started to move back into the hotel the second time it was still like a spill over but this time it moved further in.
Our team decided to take our stuff and pile into the bus. When most of us had got into the bus people started screaming and there was a thunderous sound outside and people were just running out of the hotel and our bus driver started the bus and we were picking up people as we sped out of the hotel and as we closed the bus door we could see the hotel doors which were about 7-8ft high burst out with water. The water was following our bus and when we got out onto the dirt road the water came from the top of the road too, bringing along with it a small vehicle that was swept by the water and it got stuck between our bus and the narrow walled road. This would have been what prevented our bus from getting swept into the sea. While we watched the water level around the bus started rising and came upto the windows of the bus, there was a growing panic among us as well but amazingly it started to subside just before spilling into the bus.
The men were now on full alert and a great source of strength to the women – they helped us climb out of the windows of the bus and took us up to safety to a village temple on a hill and then went back down and helped clear the rubble and the small vehicle out of the way so we could start travelling inland. When the water level went down far enough to start the bus we started moving inland.
The roads were chaotic; people were screaming driving all over the the wet roads, some were carrying others off the sides of the roads and piling them into vehicles. Everyone was bracing themselves for another wave. We picked up seven tourists on the way – they were all not fluent in English and had lost everything they owned and were running for thier lives in thier swimwear. I meet a mother and her two sons on the roadside and they didn’t know where their father and one brother was. There was another couple who had lost thier entire team of 21 friends and were anxious to hear about thier safety.
When we started nearing home Matthew and I decided to take over the seven tourists. We had no idea what to do with them, but they seemed so desperate and we didn’t want to leave them at a police station as they were helpless. We got off at a freinds place as we weren’t sure whether our home (which is also close to the beach) was accessible.
After making some phone calls we found where to take the tourists and when we took them to the place which was the company in charge of the hotel we were at, they made some phone calls and found out that the father and brother of the small family were safe. It was wonderful to see the smiles on the faces of those two kids. The company took over thier relocation work and they were in good hands, and they were looking into the where abouts of the other tourists when we had to leave because we still didn’t know the state of our own home.
We got home about 5.00 in the evening and thankfully our home wasn’t hit by the wave. It had stopped further down the road and as our house was on a higher elevation it was spared. My parents had been trying to get through to us all this time. We spoke with them and told them we were safe, but we were advised to spend the night further inland. we spent one that night and the following night at an aunts house, but the damage in the counrty by then in all the news we were hearing was so great that we couldn’t stay home anymore.
So a day and a half later with me still nervous to go anywhere close to the beach, we decided to take that step anyways. We helped out at a beach shelter and then at the collection center for relief work with the church. Today we both woke up exhausted, and still there’s so much to do. The need in the country is mind boggling.
In all this we are almost speechless at the power of what we saw, and we don’t count ourselves any better than the next person to have survived this. All we can think is that there is still more for us to do. Amazingly we have no questions, we are thankful to have come through this but we are deeply saddened by the sorrow we see around us. We also feel a greater sense of how small we are and how much we need to do here. The need is so immense. The death toll is over 23,000 and rising in Sri lanka and there are so many more dead around the region… the people left behind need a lifetime of memories calmed from thier minds. We sometimes feel helpless, sometimes depressed, sometimes scared, but we are praying for strength to be able to be of use, and taking every opportunity we can to do what we can.
Rushika