As towering waves came crashing into the southern coast of Sri Lanka on Dec. 26, 2004, Kushil Gunasekera gathered up his children and they ran for their lives to a nearby temple, the highest point they could find.
Returning later to his village in Seenigama District, he found a heart-breaking scene of death and devastation — one in four had been killed by the Boxing Day tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean.
A decade on, Seenigama has risen from the ashes and is now a model of prosperity, thanks in large part to the efforts of Gunasekera, who led a relief drive from the ruins of his ancestral home and later gave up his lucrative sugar business to devote himself to a charity he had founded in 1999.
Photo: Reuters
However, Seenigama is an outlier along the ravaged coastline. Tourists have returned to the palm-fringed beaches, but livelihoods still hang by a thread in many villages that got scant assistance from the state.
In nearby Pereliya village — where more than 1,500 people perished, most of them passengers on a train that was hurled off its tracks as the waves rolled in — many feel abandoned and angry.
“Nothing has changed in our lives,” said G. Premalal, a fisherman at Pereliya beach, where the government has erected a granite monument to the tsunami dead. “We have low quality houses. A lot of money was donated for us, but it was not distributed equally. Some got richer and richer because of the tsunami money, while others simply became poorer.”
More than 250,000 people died in the tsunami, which was triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra island.
Indonesia bore the brunt, but Sri Lanka was the next worst-affected country with a death toll of about 40,000.
Seenigama, about 110km south of Colombo, was hit particularly hard by the tsunami because reefs that might have shielded it had been destroyed by years of coral mining.
Years before the disaster, Gunasekera had started his Foundation of Goodness non-governmental organization to generate alternative livelihoods for the coral miners, but the tsunami, which wrecked thousands of houses and schools, presented him with a much bigger challenge.
Seven photographs are propped up on a table in the front hall of D. Karunawathi’s house, a reminder of the family members she lost in the tsunami, including her mother, sister, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. None of their bodies were found.
“Yes, we lost lives, but we got a permanent home,” 60-year-old Karunawathi said from her robust two-story house.
However, Gunasekera’s project went far beyond bricks and mortar.
Leaning on his own charisma and connections, including some of Sri Lanka’s best-known cricketers, Gunasekera brought together villagers, volunteers and donors, plowing financial assistance into long-term projects to build a comprehensive and sustainable model of community development.
The project now provides free services for more than 25,000 people, ranging from healthcare to vocational training and a sports academy for the young that has already produced two national-level cricketers.
On the day of the disaster, Pulina Tharanga had set out for a school cricket match with a pair of shoes that his mother had bought for 2,000 rupees (US$15), money she had earned selling rice noodles over several months. When he returned she was dead.
“She had asked me not to play cricket because she couldn’t afford it,” said Tharanga, who played for Sri Lanka’s junior national team in the 2012 World Cup in Brisbane, Australia.
The Foundation of Goodness village project depends heavily on foreign donors.
The academy’s cricket ground was financed by England’s Surrey Cricket Club and a swimming pool was funded by Canadian rock singer Bryan Adams.
“We harness waves of compassion to overcome waves of destruction and rebuild better,” Gunasekera said.
“When a tragedy like that happens, you can’t reverse it. You need to look ahead and stay positive,” he said.
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
RSS