"More water is coming ..."
The following account is generously shared by one of the 2004 program assistants, who stayed on after December 13 (the day most students departed) to enjoy the sites of Sri Lanka. Tristan Gleason (Bowdoin, 2002) is still in Sri Lanka (as of January 20, 2005), assisting in the relief effort. He promises to finish the story as soon as time allows.
The following events took place between around 9:00 – 9:30 a.m. on the morning of December 26th, at the South Ceylon restaurant and guesthouse in Unawatuna:
I awoke to my brother at the screen door of my room, yelling through the mesh that it was nine o’clock. We had decided the previous night to get up at a reasonable hour with the goal of finding rooms that were a little less musty, and maybe closer to the beach. I rolled over and sat up in bed, and looked around for my glasses. Once sight was mine again, I began to gather up the contents of my backpack that had exploded all over the wicker divan. After getting a few things sorted out, I managed to get contacts into my eyes, and stood up to look around the room and open the door to the sunny day outside. Julia, a traveler from Germany I had met on a trip to Unawatuna a week or so earlier, was sharing the room with me, and was also getting her things together. I peeked my head around the corner that portioned off the so-called bathroom, and checked for other belongings.
As I walked back to bed, where my bag laid waiting for the final stages of packing, I noticed that the bird chirping outside was suddenly joined by shouts from out on the road. Thinking back, I believe that this change barely scratched the surface of my consciousness, as a noisy street is anything but rare in Sri Lanka. It wasn’t until I glanced towards the door and the inviting warmth of the morning sun that I noticed a small trickle of water began to enter the room.
I distinctly remember that my first reaction was a small chuckle; I could only imagine that the source of the water was some overturned cistern from nearby, or a broken pipe. Soon water was swirling around my feet, and I shouted at Julia to get her stuff off of the divan and onto the higher ground provided by her bed. The water was approaching my shins, and I stepped onto my own bed to watch the former trickle become a small but swift-moving stream.
I felt sort of like a kid in grade school hearing about sex for the first time — the content of my situation was so unbelievable and foreign that I didn’t know what to do but laugh, so I stood on my bed grinning like an idiot at the pure absurdity of my situation. The calm, sunny day outside prevented me from imagining that anything dire was going on, and it wasn’t until the water began to soak through my mattress and then cause my bed to float that the possibility that I was in any danger even crossed my mind. Even then I was more concerned about keeping my belongings dry than any issues of personal safety. Floods and the like were caused by too much rain; here I had spent the past several days under sunny skies, and all I had to do was peer out the door to see the evidence of blue sky and sunshine.
But then, I was standing waist-deep in water, clad in nothing but my boxer shorts, and frantically trying to keep my small shoulder bag containing my passport and plane tickets out of the water. I told a panic-stricken Julia to grab whatever was most important, and to head towards the stairs in the front of the building that lead up to restaurant on the second floor. I shouted a similar message to my brother and friend Dave who were staying next door, and started to walk against the onslaught of water that was now pouring through the door. By the time I pushed Julia out of the room in front of me, the water was chest high, and my mind was wheeling. The room to the other side of me was occupied by a couple who were standing on support beams that held the porch above us, small video camera in hand. For a moment I stared at them stupidly; clearly they were also having a hard time believing that anything worth worrying about was occurring, and I brusquely pushed them out of the way as Julia and I made our way to the stairs. Behind me, my brother was emerging from his room with surfboard and bag floating in front of him. I pushed Julia up the stairs until she had made contact with solid ground, and followed her up the stairs to get my first glimpse of the chaos occurring in the street in front of me.
A car had been washed into the concrete wall in front of the guesthouse, and the street had become a river full of people with bewildered looks on their faces. But quickly that puzzled look would change to one of horror, as lifeless bodies joined the scene. I realized that my wallet and guitar were still in the room, as well as several of Julia’s belongings, and I started back down the stairs into the water to see if I could recover anything. I passed my brother and Dave on their way towards the stairs, and could give nothing for reassurance other than a face blank with shock. I climbed over furniture and other debris that now blocked the walkway back to my room, and made my way through the water, dark gray by this time, and giving off a rank odor of diesel, the ocean, and raw sewage. An amazingly lucky blind hand in the water made contact with my wallet, and I grabbed my guitar case off the bed where it was floating.
As I rounded the corner to the front of the guesthouse, I saw my brother and Dave trying to assist in the act of giving CPR to the limp body of a woman who had been laid on the hood of the washed up car. I stood paralyzed for a moment, watching helplessly as they attempted to pump life back into her, but it quickly became evident that too much time had already passed. Then, finally, the gravity of the situation set in.
Somehow, it is much easier to write about the short few minutes when the wave struck then it is to describe the strange four days that followed in Unawatuna. There was a surreal quality to the days once we realized that we were safe in the midst of such widespread and devastating tragedy. As we stood on the upper floor of the South Ceylon restaurant as the water from the first surge began to recede from the street below, we were baffled as to what our next plan of action should be. The manager of the place was throwing valuables together, and told us rather explicitly that he did not trust the structural integrity of the building we were in. We ourselves had seen the water quickly demolish the concrete wall that previously shielded the South Ceylon from the road, and the wooden posts that held up the second level porch were precarious at best. And so we too began to make a small bag each of our valuables — passports, plane tickets, etc. — and decided to begin walking towards Galle Rd.
The water in the street was still knee-deep, and there was a fairly steady stream of people trudging through the water, and on two occasions we heard the shout of "more water is coming," as people ran past us. The bright sunny day still left us clueless as to the cause of the water, and so we had little ability to assess how possible a second surge was. After a half kilometer, we came upon a group of people who had been eating breakfast at the South Ceylon as the wave had hit, and who we had heard discuss the possibility of moving inland a little way to a guest house that was more solidly constructed. A large white wall surrounded an even larger white house, clearly of at least three stories, and unmarred by the water other than a few puddles lying in the front yard. The idea of getting out onto the Galle Rd. with the rush of other people was less than appealing, as we still were so completely unsure of what we were dealing with. And so the four of us — my brother Abe, our friend Dave, and our traveling companion Julia — walked into the blue front gate of the place where we would ride out the initial onslaught of the tsunami.
We were welcomed in by a Sri Lankan boy of about twelve, who told us in his perfect British English that he would go ask his dad if a couple of wet, dirty, and shaken tourists could take refuge in his house for a while. A moment later his dad stepped out of the kitchen, a big British guy, who greeted us with a big grin and a pack of imported cigarettes. Our shaky fingers tried to find some relief from the tobacco, as we sat in the comfortable chairs in a large, open living room area. In the corner, an ornamented artificial Christmas tree reminded us of the date, and we stared at each other for a while, trying to get a grip on what was going on. There were several other tourists who were with us in the living room, and I could only imagine that their ashen faces were similar to my own. And while we all spoke softly to one another about where we had been and what we had seen, feeling that sense of camaraderie that emerges in time of tragedy, there was no sharing of names. Only Russell, the British owner had a name, and every one else was somehow described or placed in reference to our benefactor: the Swedish woman from the South Ceylon; Russell’s son and his wife; the Australian couple who were in Sri Lanka studying the slender loris. Somehow names just didn’t come up, or seem appropriate just yet.
But we managed to settle down to some extent, to eat some bananas, and discuss what it was that could have brought the sudden onslaught of water. Some proposed a massive tidal wave, caused by the full moon, but this seemed unsatisfactory to my brother and Dave and I. We just couldn’t imagine a tidal wave causing this amount of water to come onto land. This theory was further shaken by the second surge of water that occurred later, early in the afternoon. The water didn’t come as high this time, but we still saw its swirling darkness creep back up onto the road for a moment or two before subsiding again.
After a short talk with Russell, whose hospitality was outstanding and unshakeable, we were invited to occupy a couple of rooms on the upper floor, where an open-roofed garden would provide us space to hang our wet clothes. So we journeyed back to the South Ceylon, and packed up the majority of our clothes items, many still wet and stinking of diesel and sewage. Water and electricity was out, and we had a hard time imagining its return anytime soon. But at the very least it would be nice to have our belongings back together, and be able to unpack and so begin to feel a little settled again.
~o~