From thriving community to devastation, how it looks from Hambantota, Sri Lanka

Plan staff report from the southern coast of Sri Lanka

Our arrival at the tsunami-hit coast from inland came almost as a physical shock. We moved almost instantly from a world of orderly green fields and neat little houses with pretty gardens to a scene of utmost devastation. Smashed and flattened houses, over-turned trucks and buses washed far from the road, uprooted trees – and bodies on the beach and in the lagoon.

The low-lying part of Hambantota town – an area about 1.5 km long by 0.5 km wide between the ocean and lagoon – has been almost completely demolished. Only a few solidly built structures – a Buddhist temple, a mosque, and one or two houses – stand out in a sea of rubble. 

Soldiers, volunteers and relatives are still searching through the rubble for bodies. Everywhere there is the smell of death and decay, and many people wear scarves across their faces. The dead are buried in mass graves – photographs are taken so bodies can be later identified.

There are similar scenes in two other large centres, Tangalle and Kirinda, and at low-lying hamlets.

The district government and army are making huge efforts to respond in unimaginably difficult circumstances. Many district government staff have themselves lost colleagues, friends and relatives. Roads have been cleared through the rubble. Land and cell phones and electricity were cut, but are now beginning to be intermittently restored. The district hospital has treated large numbers of injured people, and is striving to set up health services in the camps. Plan has helped support this essential work by immediately contributing $100,000 to the government’s national fund for the disaster.

There has also an extraordinary outpouring of help from ordinary people throughout Sri Lanka to help tsunami victims. Local radio and TV, religious groups and businesses have organised collections of food, bottled water and clothes, and organised long convoys of trucks, minibuses and cars to transport and distribute these directly in the areas.

We visited a small community, near Kahandanodara, from which Plan had very recently phased out. Ironically Plan’s last project involved the construction of some houses, which were designed with a high level of participation by children and women.

The 70+ families were not rich before last Sunday’s tsunami, but they had reached a decent and acceptable standard of living, and clearly felt that their lives were improving. One former Plan volunteer, Ramini, told us of the bamboo beach huts which they rented out to back-packing young foreign tourists and of her husband’s small fishing boat.

The well-being of this community, which Plan had previously worked with, was a real achievement. In a few minutes on Sunday morning it was all lost – livelihoods, homes and virtually all their property. They are now close to destitute. And, worst of all, one family has lost a child.

Today we also heard informal and unsubstantiated reports of suicides amongst people who have lost everything – their families and their whole way of life.

Report by Michael Diamond, Plan Asia's Regional Director, and Terence McCaughan, Regional Program Support Manager