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December 30, 2004THE VICTIMS
Amid Chaos, Sri Lankans Are Struggling to SurviveBy SETH MYDANS
ILAVELI, Sri Lanka, Dec. 29 - His home gone, his family shivering and hungry, everything he owned swept out to sea, Velu Kannan wandered down a lonely road on Wednesday looking for a pen.
Stagnant salt water lay in the fields around him, reflecting a gray sky. In his hands he carried a piece of cardboard he had found among the debris.
"I need somebody to help me write 'Refugee Camp,' " he said. "All the cars drive past us. Nobody knows we are here."
Mr. Kannan and his family fled their fishing village when it was destroyed on Sunday and took refuge with 10 other families on a hillside where they hoped to be safe if giant waves crashed in again from the sea. Now he needed to survive.
All along the shoreline here in Trincomalee district on the hard-hit eastern coast of Sri Lanka, small groups have found shelter in schools, temples, vacant buildings or makeshift tents, kept alive by small donations from private convoys of trucks and vans.
"What we need is clothes," said Wasantakumari Sridhar, 35, who was camped by the side of the road under a tarpaulin with two other women, three men and nine children. "Our homes have become mud. Everything we had is gone."
Not far down the road, in the shelter of a half-built gasoline station, Pasida Muhamad said: "We only want food and milk. We are not asking for everything. But our babies have no milk to drink."
The death toll in Sri Lanka continued to climb Wednesday past 22,000 as more bodies were pulled from debris or floated ashore with the tides, to be quickly buried. At the same time, a new potential disaster approached as up to two million people remained homeless without adequate food, water, sanitation and medical care.
Some, like the families along the road here in Nilaveli, were receiving small handouts. Others, like the villagers north of the broken bridge at Kuchchaveli or farther south on the sand bars near Batticaloa, remained beyond the reach of aid.
"It's a mess," said Patrick Walder, who heads the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross here in Trincomalee. "The problem is disorganization. There are many agencies and they are not coordinated. The government is not coordinating. Some of the district offices are wiped out so we have nothing to work with."
Private banks are running out of money, he said. Fuel and medicine are running short. There is an immediate need for the basics of food and shelter. If disease begins to spread, as many people fear, medical care will become urgent.
In the initial division of labor, he said, the government is responsible for food distribution; standard emergency stockpiles will soon run out. The government has also begun chlorinating contaminated wells. Large areas must have electric power restored. Scores of bridges need to be rebuilt.
Red Cross agencies will provide survival kits that include sleeping mats, plastic sheeting, plates, cups, buckets, cooking pans, soap, washing powder and sheets. The first trucks of supplies began heading here from the capital, Colombo, on Wednesday.
"The question is, are there enough supplies to meet the demand?" said John Punter, another official with the International Committee for the Red Cross. "Are there a million plastic buckets in Sri Lanka?"
Soon, planeloads of aid will start arriving in Colombo from abroad, he said. "The first thing is, where do you start? It's everywhere. It's the whole country. And not only is it one country, it's six or seven countries over a massive area."
Sri Lanka's challenges - from survival to subsistence to the avoidance of epidemics- are only the beginning. In this poor country of 20 million people, as many as a million or more now have no way to earn a living.
"What we need is boats," said the men sheltering on the hillside with Mr. Kannan. Like most of these coastal refugees, they were fishermen and like most of them, their boats, nets and motors were swallowed by the ocean that once fed them.
Once the world has spent millions of dollars on aid to the victims here and around the region, it is hard to know how these penniless fishermen will find the means to support their families again.
In Trincomalee, which was sheltered in a cove from the worst of the inundation, scores of fishermen have pulled their boats out of the harbor for safety and they now line the narrow streets like parked cars.
As a measure of the national trauma here, the disaster caused by an undersea earthquake measuring a 9.0 magnitude is now being referred to on television as "9.0, 2004." Radio stations have begun reading out the names of the missing, just as desperate families in America posted photographs of the missing after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Some people are raising the hope of a silver lining - that this calamity will help bring together the Tamil and Sinhalese sides that fought nearly 20 years of civil war until a fragile cease-fire was declared in 2002.
Mr. Walder of the Red Cross said the Tamil rebels have been "quite well organized" in bringing relief to areas they control. The aid group associated with them, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, has been cooperating well with the government, he said.
In Trincomalee, Sunday's natural disaster struck an area that had been torn apart by fighting for years. Along the Nilaveli road, buildings knocked askew by the ocean stand side by side with the rubble of buildings destroyed by war.
The turbulent waves robbed a nearby military base of its weapons just as Tamil raiders had done in the past and scattered buried land mines back into areas that had been cleared since the cease-fire.
On the grounds of the ruined Nilaveli Hotel, cars hung from trees along with bits of clothing, a dead goat and a head of cabbage.
Foam hissed up the quiet beach and the ocean stretched to the horizon, placid and glittering, almost smug after this demonstration of its power.
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