A New Bike

View Enlarged Photo and CaptionLife is looking up a little bit for Chathura Madhushanka, a 13-year-old boy who lost his mother and two siblings during the tsunami. For weeks after the tsunami, he hung out around the refugee camp, not wanting to play with other children and not wanting to go anywhere. At night, he was wakened by nightmares of other tsunamis. There were days when he didn't even want to go to school.

The other day, I brought Chathura a new sports bicycle presented by an anonymous donor, along with some masonry tools for his father, Sarath. They are both delighted. Sarath takes his son to school every day on the bicycle. He has also repaired a little tractor-trailer that was his main means of livelihood before the tsunami. When I went to see him, he had just earned $3.75 for a day's work, compared to $4.60 a day before the disaster.

Chathura introduced me to two new girl friends, Sumeda, 14, and Sulojana, who is almost 12. He calls them his "tsunami friends" because he met them in the camp. "We used to play badminton a lot until they lost the badminton rackets," he says, grinning. "Now, most of the time, we go to the TV room in the camp and play games with other kids from the camp."

Sarath says he still doesn't know how much longer they will be in the refugee camp, when they will get a permanent house or even IF they will get a house. He is skeptical about government promises to provide tsunami victims with loans to rebuild their houses. Even if the promises are true, he says, he doesn't want to go back to his old house because it is too close to the sea. "My son is afraid to go back there," he says. "I would rather rent a place somewhere not so close to the sea."

This past weekend, the family assembled at a relative's house in Weligama for a Buddhist ritual called an alms giving to honor their dead, three months after the tsunami. These alms givings are usually quite elaborate affairs. There is always food (rice and curry) for the guests, and Buddhist monks are invited to say prayers for the deceased.

-- Sascha Gerbracht

By washingtonpost.com |  March 28, 2005; 11:26 AM ET  | Category:  Sascha Gerbracht
Previous: How to Speak Sinhalese | Next: Fear of Another Tsunami