President's Message
Making an acquaintance with disasterBy Betty Webb
BATH, ENGLAND -- As we drove away from Yala Safari Lodge, a beautiful tourist hotel on the beach in southern Sri Lanka, I said to my husband, "Had I known this area was going to be so interesting, I would have wanted to stay two nights." Had we done so, we would almost certainly be dead and, if not, then surely badly injured.
Instead, we left on schedule and headed for a night in Galle, putting us back in Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, the day ahead of the tsunami, in a hotel on a promontory from which we watched in horror as the disaster unfolded.
But this is not our story. We suffer only from survivors' guilt and a keen awareness of a near miss for us and a total disaster for countless others.
We are haunted by the faces of the staff and other guests at Yala Lodge, most of whom are missing or known dead. We wonder, but are destined never to know, if the 4-year-old Sri Lankan boy who had seen both a leopard and a sloth bear survived to tell his friends.
He could only shiver with delight as he told us he had managed what we had not -- to see the elusive animals that bring tourists to Yala National Park, where the largest known number of leopards reside. Was his fate to perish as the wall of water swept everything away -- or had he, like us, moved on to safer ground?
And what about the English boy from Suffolk who had been biking around the island? Seated side by side at a restaurant by the sea, we had chatted. He couldn't imagine that in a few days we would be spending New Year's Eve in Suffolk, and we couldn't imagine that he had survived the Sri Lankan roads for two months on a motorbike.
The fate of some of the children with whom we spent part of Christmas Eve is more certain because they had nowhere to flee. The poorest of the poor, they lived on a beach at Galle, spending the nights in bamboo and palm lean-tos. I can see them now. They would have been intrigued to see the sea retreating ahead of the tsunami. They would have followed it out, skipping and laughing excitedly -- picking up the exposed bounty of the shelled sea creatures on which they survived. When the wall of water advanced, they would have been powerless. They could not have survived.
I remember most vividly a girl of about 10 -- walnut skin, a large smile that reflected her sassy manner, a gap between her front teeth, shoulder-length black curly hair. When I see the media coverage of bloated, distorted bodies of children, I imagine I see her. Knowing the answer in advance, I will ask our tour guide to see if he can find her and tell me if, miraculously, she survived.
Some did. The vacationing family that invited us in for sweet milky tea are among them. Walking back to our hotel on Christmas Eve, we were approached by a young boy who took my hand and tugged me toward a crowd of waving hands appearing at the door of a cinderblock house on the seafront. Twenty-four people from Colombo were visiting relatives in Galle, bringing to 30 the number of people sharing two rooms.
They sat us in the two plastic chairs in the front room and we managed somehow, with their limited English and our non-existent Sinhalese and Tamil, somehow to learn about each other. The handsome boy of 12 was a high jumper; his 17-year-old sister was engaged; his auntie was the best cook; his uncle has a shop. They were three families visiting a fourth. One asked me if her daughter could come to the United States and be my servant. She wasn't joking.
When we parted company, they gave us a Colombo address and asked us to send a postcard from the USA. We tried to tell them how much it meant to us, on Christmas Eve, to be invited into a Muslim home. I think they understood.
On Dec. 27, the day after the tsunami hit, I realized that we did not know when these families had planned to return to Colombo. And then I remembered that we had an address for them. A Sri Lankan friend volunteered to take us to see if we could learn what had become of them. When she emerged from a rabbit's warren of tiny houses with the high jumper in tow, I blinked back tears.
We followed him to their house -- and learned that, because they had taken the first train back to Colombo on the day the tsunami hit, all had survived. All six members of the family of relatives they were visiting had perished.
Our Sri Lankan friend, though a grand and well-off Sinhalese, instinctively and graciously invited our new friends to her house for tea that very afternoon, enabling us to repay in kind the hospitality we had received. Fourteen of them came. Their amazement that we had come to find out how they had fared brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it. The mere fact that we were Western made us too important to be expected to care about them.
And that brings me to my point. It is because we are from the West that we must care about them. Our response to this crisis must be immediate, generous, sustained. We need to write checks to Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam --or to our favorite international aid agency. We must give until we feel it -- until we have, as a result of our giving, to give up something ourselves.
And we must do this to show solidarity with those who have lost everything. Our caring can sustain them in their great grief and assist them in the enormous rebuilding tasks that await them.
Already the pundits are talking about a lost generation of South Asian youngsters. It is our responsibility -- our privilege, in fact -- to prove that prediction wrong.
(Betty Webb is director of the Study Abroad program and professor of English at Raleigh's Meredith College.)