Back in Weligama

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I am back in Weligama, the Sri Lankan fishing village where I was swimming on the morning of December 26, 2004, when the tsunami hit. I have come back here to piece together the story of what happened to this community of 30,000 people during the tsunami, and follow the relief efforts. I am also helping to raise money to support reconstruction projects launched by my brother Geoffrey (who owns a tiny island, just offshore) and other local Weligama businessmen.

My bosses at the Post have generously granted me a month's paid sabbatical from the paper to allow me to return to Weligama. Since I am involved, at least peripherally, in the relief effort here, I won't be doing any tsunami-related reporting for the news pages of The Post. But I will be actively contributing to this weblog on washingtonpost.com.

Hopefully, the blog will help you follow the progress of the relief work, and introduce you to some of the local characters, both Sri Lankan and foreign. It will be a kind of day-to-day diary of a community caught up in the one of the world's worst natural disasters that is now struggling to get back on its feet.

I will be encouraging local people to keep the blog going after I leave. We hope that our readers in the U.S. and around the world will contribute their comments to what we post, as well, so we can get a global conversation going. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting photographs, videoclips, and maps on the site to help everybody orient themselves. In other words, we are starting small, but we have plans to grow.

To describe the setting a little for you, Weligama is a town of about 30,000 people built around one of the largest natural bays in Sri Lanka. It's just down the coast from Galle, an old Dutch seaport, near the southernmost tip of the island. According to the mayor, the tsunami claimed around 300 lives in Weligama town and another 300 in the surrounding district. A total of 1,352 families (each with four-five people) lost their homes in Weligama. That works out to around 6,000 people, or one local inhabitant in five, either being killed or losing their homes in the tsunami.

My brother's little island of Taprobane is reached by wading across a narrow stretch of water from Weligama beach, between 50 and 100 yards, depending on whether the tide is in or out.
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The island is an outcrop of rock, about 60-feet-high, which suffered only minor damage during the tsunami. (The entryway and jetty were swept away.) I plan to tell you more about Taprobane later, but for now imagine it as a tiny speck on the map, nestled up close to Weligama town. Living on Taprobane is a little like living on a luxury cruise ship moored just off shore. You are aware of what is going on along the shoreline, but you live in your own little world.

That all changed with the tsunami.

There have actually been two tsunamis here, a natural one and a man-made one. The natural tsunami travelled clockwise along the coast, leaving a ribbon of death and destruction in its wake. The human tsunami has moved in the opposite direction, starting in the capital Colombo, and moving counter-clockwise along the coast, with the ambition of cleaning the mess up. An army of relief workers and private individuals has descended on southern Sri Lanka - firefighters and burgomeisters from Germany, divers from Belgium, plutocrats from Hong Kong, Cuban doctors, Australian surfers, even the U.S. Marine Corps. Some of these people have been very effective. Others are next to useless.

In some ways, considerable progress has taken place since I left Sri Lanka with my family just over a month ago. Much of the rubble has been cleared away, temporary camps have been built to house the homeless, the threat of a public health crisis has been averted, and nobody is starving.

In other ways, a vast amount remains to be done. The government has prohibited any reconstruction of damaged houses within a 100-meter zone from the coastline. Ostensibly this is a public safety measure. But many people suspect it is part of a land grab to make the coastline available for tourist development. Whatever the motivation, it has certainly slowed down the reconstruction work. Nobody wants to build until the government clarifies its plans for relocating the people who have lost their homes.

Stay tuned!

-- Michael Dobbs

By washingtonpost.com |  February 8, 2005; 11:30 AM ET  | Category:  Michael Dobbs
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