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Waiting to hope
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Waiting to Hope: UUSC visits Sri Lanka a year later

UUSC’s manager for our Rights in Humanitarian Crises Program, Martha Thompson, and Program Assistant Anna Bartlett recently visited UUSC partners in Sri Lanka to report on the situation a year after the tsunami. Thompson sent these thoughts about grief and loss in the region.

A colleague of mine shared a memory with me of Aceh, Indonesia, shortly after the tsunami. She had gone to visit a community on the coast that was devastated by the tsunami. Only 356 members survived out of a thousand. The scene was already familiar to her from television: twisted stumps of trees, not a single building left standing, debris everywhere, the earth torn up, the road ending in mud and sand.

She went to the temporary camp to interview the surviving villagers. She was shown into a common barracks-like building, where she found a group of about 20 women that were said to be from that village. The women were all sitting around something in their midst. When she got closer, she saw it was a baby. This baby was the only one who had survived in that village, as it had been caught on a basket and somehow survived the waves.

Far more children and women died in the tsunami than men. The initial mortality statistics were conducted on a gender-blind basis, but over the last year, women’s groups from Aceh to Sri Lanka are visiting the displaced-person encampments, conducting their own surveys and finding that women and children, but particularly children, died in the highest numbers.

A television program recorded by one of UUSC’s partners graphically shows why. The reporter is in an inland village just as the floodwaters begin to run through the paths of the community. He films as the villagers leave their houses, running up the road ahead of the water, which is beginning to rise. A woman hurrying along hears the cry of a baby and turns back to rush into a house. By the time she comes out, carrying a child, the floodwaters are up to her knees. The video ends there abruptly but the scene was repeated countless times. Many mothers and fathers suffered the anguish of losing their children and the added anguish of not being able to save them. A young woman we spoke to in Sri Lanka showed us the scars on the legs of her two-year-old, where he was cut by barbed wire as the waters pushed him against a fence. She demonstrated how both of them were caught in the branches of the mango tree. She was trying to hold onto three children; her three-year-old and her baby died, but she was able to save this one son.

The grief and sadness that people carry with them from the loss of loved ones in the tsunami is devastating. Although UUSC works to support people’s efforts to secure shelter, livelihood, and land claims, as well as other important pieces of their lives, we must also realize that the survivors still suffer from the overwhelming loss of people they loved. Grief still hangs so heavy over people, and as they reach this one-year anniversary, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists are absorbed in ceremonies to commemorate the dead.

In communities where there has been so much loss, it’s hard to talk about stories of hope. It’s not a question of capacity or resilience. These people have showed the strength of resilience. It is more a question of what hope means for people now.

A woman in her forties speaks to us about her life as we sit on the floor of a community house in the temporary camp in Kinniya, Trincomalee district, Sri Lanka. She had gone twice to the Gulf States to work for dowries for her daughters’ marriages. She was able to use her earnings to build houses for them and see them married. She lost her husband, two children, and grandchildren. Now, with the aid of a project UUSC supports through our partner Sewalanka, she has started a small shop to help support the remaining family members, who all pitch in together. She says to us, “Now [one year later] it is enough for me to look to get through each day.”

Over and over in Aceh and Sri Lanka, I think of the Spanish verb esperanzar, which can mean either “to hope” or “to wait.” As I listen to these people tell their stories of loss and their efforts to put their lives back together despite these gaping holes, the two meanings of esperanzar fuse together in my mind as “waiting to hope.” People are trying to rebuild all over the countries devastated by the tsunami, working toward and waiting to hope.