Tsunami
As we drove along the coast line that just over 2 years ago was devastated by the tsunmai, its hard not to be overwhelmed by its beauty. The sea is a beautiful blues, the palm tress that line the beech green and all along the beach there are wonderfully painted traditional fishing boats. Yet there are clues to the power of what happened here. We cross a river and see the huge concrete bridge that was smashed in two by the power of the wave. The large church, which lost its roof and two walls and all along the coast line the foundations of homes that once were. Its difficult to imagine the power a wave like this. Everyone has stories to tell of that fateful morning. man of courage, many of miraculous escapes. but all filled with horror. In the morning we had seen a home movie taken by a man on top of a statue that sits on the tip of India at Kanykumari. He is 100foot up, so the angle he has gives a real perspective. He films the first few large waves that proceeded the tsunami and you can see how huge they were! People scream, other just stare in awe and then the camera pans out to the coastline and you see this enormous black mark all along the horizon. What strikes you is the colour. It’s a deep black and seems to blacken the whole horizon. Would assume it was only a minute or two away. The film stops there. The man who made it survived. The statue is a little out to sea. But what is horrifying is that the wave came up as high as the statues neck, around 100ft, as it came underneath him. I’ve seen the statue and its impossible to get your head around the sheer size of what was a black wall of water going at 100km an hour.
Even seeing the destruction makes it still unreal.
Yet there is hope and that seems to pevade anything. We visited the new houses and community re-building programmes and there is a defiant air of positiveness. People are rebuilding their lives and in many cases rebuilding much better and secure lives.
Yet underneath the sheen there is still despair. One woman in her new house was clearly distressed and kept talking to us. Our translator wasn’t with us so we tried to talk via sign language and a few words. She had lost her husband and 4 children and despite her new house and new skills in bee-keeping was still clearly and visibly distraught. I felt so useless – what do you say to her – what can you say? I think I mumbled something stupid like ‘I’m so sorry’, but my words hardly touched the sides.
The boys in Tsunami orphanage have a haunted look behind my eyes that I feel will never leave me. We spent some time playing with them and they put on a cultural show for us…but these were haunted haunted boys
I guess you can do everything you can to give people back material possessions – I didn’t, but in some it made the word just seem futile, but then I guess it is at least doing something and so some people, emotionally, there lives will never be rebuilt…
Recent Comments