Batticaloa, Wednesday, 5th January.
It's my first day on the motorcycle. A light blue Honda 75 cc model, it doesn't
look sturdy enough to carry us across the patches of roadway that the sea has
spared but my wife's cousin, Daya, assures me it's safe. It's my third day with
the international relief effort and I'm finally going to my own home town of Kallar.
The latest phone messages say that no medical staff have arrived as of yet, although it's now ten days after the tsunami and there are rumours that at least half of the families in the town have been affected. No-one knows for sure. The two-lane concrete causeway to the seaside town was washed away by the onslaught of the waves and the only way to get there from Batticaloa, the East Coast city in which we're based, is to bypass the lagoon and take an extra day to drive scores of miles through the hinterland and come up from the south, or to use the makeshift ferry that has been set up to get foot passengers and cycles straight across the water to Kallar. Hence, the motorcycle.
We cram as many medical supplies as we can into the backpacks that I brought from London, along with two bottles of fresh water. We don't know if there will be any clean drinking water where we're going. Daya takes the helm as I clamber, rather gingerly, onto the pillion. The last time I was on a motorcycle was in med.school, forty-four years ago, and that was a dare.
We set off but as soon as we clear the main city streets, it becomes hard-going. The flooded roads have been shored up with sand so that people can walk in and out of the city, but it's made them impassable to all but the best off-road vehicles We stop and push the bike through a sand patch, remount, ride for a few hundred yards before hitting the next sand patch, and then repeat the process. The twenty-mile journe,y which usually takes twenty minutes, takes us an hour and a quarter.
Reaching the next town, we stop. I am anxious to push on to Kallar but my wife's brother, a justice of the peace for this area, has pleaded that we stop and evaluate medical conditions here in Kaluvanchikudiyiruppu's main refugee camp. It's been set up in the high school and I spend the next few hours tending to the displaced. There are 1,985 men, women and children here, crammed into every single available space in the school. Luckily, they were not left unaided. A final year medical student was home for the holidays, waiting to hear if he'd passed his final year exams and received a government posting, when the tsunami struck. He has spent every waking minute since then bandaging, cutting and sewing scores of bodies. Seems like the posting has come to him.
And it looks like he's done a good job. His patients are all stable. He's even managed to find ways to transport the most injured to the town hospital and has stayed to tend the rest. For the moment, they'll be ok. The school has a secure, chlorinated water tank (raised high above the roof on steel pillars) as well as eleven latrines. In the face of what I've seen in the last few days, the refugees in this shelter are some of the lucky ones.
It is noon before Daya and I get back on the motorcycle. We push and ride and push the last five miles to the lagoon and the temporary ferry that the government has requisitioned. It's the old temple ferry that is normally used to take the faithful across a narrow neck of the lagoon to the Hindu temple at Manduur. It's old and rusting in parts, but it's motorized and large enough to take foot passengers and a few bikes. The makeshift nature of the new and temporary landing stage means that it's impassable to any larger vehicles. We push the bike on board and are joined by fifty other passengers and a handful of cycles and motorbikes. We are in the middle of loading when the captain announces that he's short of fuel and sets off - on foot - to the nearest gas station. He doesn't say how long he will be. We wait. The midday sun is beginning to be unbearable but there's no available shelter. Some of the passengers go in search of help. A female passenger faints and I administer first aid. Our water supplies are beginning to dwindle and we haven't got to Kallar yet. We wait some more.
Some of the passengers flag down a group of passing soldiers and somehow they all locate our missing captain (three miles away still on the coast road) and, more than an hour and a half after we first boarded, the ferry churns its way out into the main lagoon. The five mile journey takes forty-five minutes. The water's calm now but evidence of the tsunami is everywhere. As we approach Kallar, we catch a glimpse of what remains of the causeway. The sea has cut through it like butter, leaving only the odd, forlorn island of roadway, sticking out from the waves.
There is no landing site at Kallar. The ferry hesitates ten metres out from shore and we all have to wade through the water, Daya and I pushing the motorbike as we go. I silently thank my wife who insisted that I bring my Wellington boots with me from London. It seems a lifetime away since we were at home, together, in Essex, digging over the dahlias for winter.
Daya and I ride into town. The main road runs along the coast, a mile from where the sea now churns but I can see evidence of its past anger everywhere: the cemetery where my parents were buried has been washed away. Whole walls of concrete stand riven in two. Most of the houses on the beach side of the road were makeshift cabins, put up by war refugees, fleeing the violence in the north. They didn't survive.
A couple of men flag down the bike and ask us what we're doing in town. We start talking and I hear differing reports as to how many have been affected by the storm; one says five hundred families have died, the other claims a thousand. Nobody knows. It is a tight-knit community and it seems that most of the victims have been taken in by friends and extended families. The displaced fear that if they gather in one place they will fall prey to the army or to disease. The few families without kin have sought shelter in the town library so Daya and I make our way there first.
Even as we climb the stone steps to the top floor of the library, the misery is palpable. There are twenty families camped out in small, family groups between the bookcases. Many are half-naked. A few of the men and women are crying softly but for the most part, there is a ghastly silence. The children are too dazed to cry. Many of them have lost their families. Their eyes have lost all expression and most seem to be in the deep stages of trauma. It is ten days since the tsunami and we are the first medical aid to arrive.
I spend the next few hours cleaning wounds, giving tetanus injections, picking glass and barbed wire out of feet. The people who survived the wave are those who heard the sea coming and ran. They are the ones that didn't stop to put on shoes.
Daya goes from family to family as I work, finding out what they need. They need everything. A few have managed to scavenge some nylon sleeping mats for their families. A few have spread out their brine-soaked clothes to make thin, makeshift mats. Most sleep directly on the cement floor.
It seems an international aid service has been delivering raw rice and lentils on a regular basis. On good days, there are even a few vegetables. A few of the healthiest refugees have volunteered to cook for the rest of the camp but these are miserable meals. There is no tea, no sugar. None of the foreign agencies thought to provide spices and as we pack up, people beg us to send vegetables or fruit, even a little spice powder. These are small things but to Sri Lankans, who have grown up eating meals loaded with native chilies, cinnamon, black pepper and more, food without spice is practically tasteless.
By now, the young men we met on the road have rounded up a handful of friends from town and they arrive in the library, volunteering their help. I ask them to go from house to house, finding out who needs help and to compile a list. There were about 2,000 families in this small town and nobody knows how many are dead or missing. One of the men has a mobile phone and I let him know how he can reach me in the field over the next few days. A couple of the men agree to coordinate with the volunteer leader from the library camp and to make sure that I get daily updates.
We are just repacking our things onto the bike when someone spots a small van, full of people, some of them with stethoscopes around their necks. We flag them down and it turns out that they are a group of Singalese doctors and nurses from hospital in Gampara. They have come out to the East Coast on a private mercy mission and have been working around the clock for the last five days down south in Ampara city. They were supposed to be leaving back home today but they had heard reports that Kallar had been left without medical provision and had decided to make a long, tortuous detour here, on their way home. I report what I have seen today and they agree to tend to some of the scattered families in the main town before they return home, but they cannot stay. Already their supplies are almost gone and they are all due back in Gampara by tomorrow. They look exhausted. Over the last few days, I have heard of how individual citizens have got into their own cars and driven across country to help in whatever way they can, irrespective of ethnic affiliations. Time and again, ordinary Singalese citizens have risked their own lives to cross those civil war boundaries and help whoever they can. The tsunami effectively dwarfed the interests of both Tamils and Singalese and here on the ground, at least, the old ethnic divisions have been laid aside. Let us hope it stays that way.
I want to stay but the night is drawing in and the ferry back north is unpredictable. There is no knowing how late it will operate and Daya and the motorbike are already late for work at the Blind Institute back in the city. We leave the town unwillingly, but I know I will be back.
Dr. Sundaralingam
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