December 30, 2004 Update from Colombo

On Thursday afternoon I delivered “our refugee” Matthew to the American Embassy so he could be interviewed by CNN, on how the Embassy was able to help him in this crisis. Look for his 4 minute clip in rotation on domestic CNN, he is wearing a black t-shirt and has 2 Frankenstein scars on his forehead. Afterward I delivered him into the hands of the Australian High Commission who were evacuating a busload to their Quantas flight departing that night to Singapore and Sydney. Matthew just emailed me and is safe and sound in Kuala Lumpur, making his way up to Bangkok.

After delivering Matthew I headed over to a huge convention center where many countries including Britain and Australia had been delivering their citizens by the busload- they had sent buses down south to collect stranded tourists. They had stacks of mattresses and registration tables where they received and processed people to take them off their missing lists. When I arrived only about 20 people remained, all others had already been evacuated and the final group was shipping out that night. They had heard they might get a busload of 20 arriving that day, but they were unsure if that was true. The British High Commission told me that of the 2000 Brits in country, about 200 were still on their missing lists. The Americans had about 200 supposed to be in SL, and 87 names remain on our missing list, 7 confirmed dead. I heard that there was a group of 150 Japanese tourists in Yala National Wildlife Park, and all are lost. On the East Coast where Yala, Arugam Bay, and Batticaloa are, the water apparently traveled 45 kilometers inland.

I headed home and received a call from the Medical Officer Marty at the American Embassy asking me if I could come in yesterday to support him while he saw patients, as his staff was out. So I worked at the Embassy answering the phone for him while he dressed wounds for a group of people who had been at Unawatuna Beach just south of Galle. One American woman about 28 had lost her Sri Lankan husband and was in very bad shape. Her father had flown in from New York and was with her, along with her friends who had been on holiday with her. They were flying home in a few days without having found her husband’s body, and they would need surgery on their wounds in the U.S. Almost everyone I saw was injured on their legs and feet, huge scrapes and open wounds. They told me it was from walking in waist high water after the first wave, searching for friends. They were stepping on all kinds of things, trees, bicycles, furniture and bodies, none of which they could see under their feet of course while they were frantically moving through the water. They left to go visit her father-in-law who was in ICU at a local hospital.

One of the Embassy FSNs (foreign service national) had lost 14 family members down south. He had gone down and dug through bodies to find them, finding his aunt down a well where she had fallen trying to escape the water. He was back at work trying to keep some kind of normalcy to retain his sanity until he could deal with it. The embassy has an FSN Emergency Fund set up to assist their employees’ families, but it is seriously depleted and needing donations as well.

Marty was contacting Washington DC about rumors of a forensic team that he heard was going to Thailand to ID bodies using DNA. There are 12 badly decomposed bodies of foreigners in the morgue here, and we are trying to determine who they are by dental records or DNA before cremation. Washington called back and said there is a military base in Thailand with a division for POWs/MIAs and they were probably the ones involved.

The Embassy was cremating an American woman at 2:30pm, and the Marty had planned to go but he could not get away. At 3:30pm the woman’s French fiancé was brought to the embassy delirious with grief, having taken his girlfriend’s ashes from the cemetery and smashing computers at the funeral home in helpless rage. He was in the waiting room staring at a photo of his beautiful girlfriend saying “I killed you twice.” People from the French Embassy were with him, but did not know what to do. Marty sedated him, and said he would take him to his own home to stay until he left on Sunday with his girlfriend’s ashes to deliver them to her parents in the US.

I suddenly remembered my friend Annie was traveling around SL with her husband over Christmas, and planned to be on Trincomalee Beach on the East Coast on Christmas Day. I called her mobile number, and thankfully she answered. She said she is alive only because she was struck down with Dengue Fever and has been in the hospital in Colombo since her husband arrived. They never left.

Meanwhile, Pete’s partners in the Public Service Nurses Union stormed his office demanding to be given resources to help if they could, and he has organized a grass roots team of doctors and nurses to travel south to a refugee camp where there is a clinic needing medicine. They purchased a vanload of medicine and rented another van for the nurses, and they left this morning via the inland road to Ambulangoda (where our refugee was when the wave hit). Pete will see where they are going first hand, and whether more resources need to be allocated there or elsewhere. The word from USAID officials I spoke with last night is that the road south to Galle is receiving a lot of supplies now, and other parts of the country are in dire straits due to difficulty in accessing them.

After this difficult day, I returned home to be partially rejuvenated by baby Zoe, who continues to be a joy. I will volunteer this Sunday at the Embassy once again as they are available round the clock to answer phones should anyone call in, though hope seems to be disappearing as the days go by.

Emily Castelli

December 28th, 2004. News from Colombo after Tsunami

On Tuesday night at 10pm the Embassy called asking us to house a young man who had just arrived from the beaches. They sent him right over and Matthew O’Connell from St. Louis via India has been staying with us. He arrived exhausted and shaking, with stitches in his head from the hospital in Galle. We gave him a shower, clothes, and put him straight to bed. The next morning he awoke much refreshed to tell us his story. He had arrived Christmas Day, planning to meet a friend later that week on the beach. He traveled 2 hours south to a small beach town and got a bungalow on the beach. In the morning he and a roommate awoke to see water on the floor of their bungalow, so they stepped outside. All the locals and tourists were walking down to the beach, where the water had receded so far out they could pick up octopi and lobster from the ocean floor. He had an octopus in his hand when people behind him started running – he saw the water coming, but it didn’t look to severe so he quickly went to his room to get his valuables, and started to close the door behind him when the water hit. He was under water for about 30 seconds and when he came up for air he was outside – the bungalow had collapsed around him, and everyone was being carried by the wave. He held onto a tree and was able to ride it out.

Matthew, a survivor.
Yesterday I took him to the American Embassy for a medical checkup and to obtain a new passport. The scene at the embassy was terrible. Acouple were in an office hysterical, their 5 year old had died, and now they could not locate the body. The embassy was calling all the hospital morgues. Their personal home was in Phuket, they were on holiday in Sri Lanka. The sight of their grief and loss brought me to tears. In the waiting room for the nurse were 2 Swedes and British woman who had been on the East Coast in a well-known surfer spot called Arugam Bay, typically packed with Australians and others during the holidays. Their story was one of gigantic waves, bigger than the West Coast. The first and smaller wave came and it was 12 meters high. The Swedish woman climbed a palm tree, and when the water receded, she said it went out till she could no longer see the ocean at all – it was gone. She knew that this was trouble, and there would be another wave within 10 minutes. She climbed down and ran screaming for her boyfriend. She found him and they just had time to climb a tree when the second huge wave it, taking away all the hotels and bungalows on the beach below them. They stayed in the tree for 2 hours and watched several more huge waves come in. She said there were about 50 tourists who survived. Their American friend was in his room with his buddy when the water came. They held onto their mattress and each other. After the second wave his buddy thought the worst was over, loosened his grip, and was immediately swept away by the next one. He fears his friend is dead. All bridges and roads were washed away, and these 40 or 50 people were choppered out 8 at a time further up the east coast. They had a severely injured man with them so could not take a bus to Colombo. Someone they knew in the city sent their SUV out to find them, eventually the driver picked them up and drove them to Colombo in 15 hours.

These are just a few of the stories, there are so many more. So many people were separated from their spouses and children, they are emotionally devastated. It was impossible to hold one to one another with the force of the waves. Several had stories of people who had surgery in hospitals, and the wounds becoming infected.

Still we have heard virtually nothing about the North and East Coasts of Sri Lanka which are controlled by the Tamil Tigers, except a story that land mines are now floating out to sea. There will be many more casualties in the next few days.

All the tourists I met commented on how the Sri Lankan people took care of them, helping them find their belongings and friends, giving them money and food, and transporting them to hospitals and the embassy after having lost everything themselves. All of them were so grateful to be taken in at the American Embassy, given shoes and clothing and food, and international calls to their families regardless of their citizenship. The Embassy has truly been a port in the storm for them, working with half the personnel they usually have as many go home on annual leave at Christmas. People are slowly trickling in from the South and East, arriving at all hours of the day and night.

Thank you all for your well wishes and donations, I will continue to write more as I have time.

Emily Castelli

December 1, 2004 New Life in Colombo

In Colombo I mostly run around doing errands to
bring the house up to snuff. Bought a new refrigerator and a full size
dryer, since the air is so moist and it usually rains every afternoon, line
drying clothes is not practical. And because it is so humid, you must wash
your clothes more often. Tonight we let our housekeeper go which was a bit
painful but necessary, after a month here it was clear that we/I need a
live-in cook more than anything, since I find it hard to cook what I know,
and I don’t have time to figure out the local cuisine. So we have lined up
a cook/nanny from another American family who is leaving 12/13. She will
live-in, allowing us some flexibility of leaving Zoe at home rather than
having me schlep her from place to place which gets to be hard going as she
gets heavier, and interrupts precious nap time for her. She is also an
excellent cook of both Sri Lankan and Western food. Tomorrow I start the
hunt for a live-out maid to take care of laundry, ironing, and mopping
floors. We have a very good driver who takes me everywhere, and helps me
figure out handyman things around the house. We will sell our ’87
Mitsubishi Wagon in February when we get a ’93 Mitsubishi Galant Sedan
instead, from a departing Embassy couple ­ this will be more comfortable
for us, and with the time we spend in the car this is crucial. You don’t
walk around much here, especially with a baby ­ it’s pretty much door to
door delivery.

We have a jackfruit tree in the front yard, and the other
day it attracted 4 huge fruitbats of the flying fox variety, we stood out
there watching them walk around the tree using their wing/claws like arms ­
so strange. Today we left the house as it was sprayed for insects, which
has to be done monthly to keep ants and mosquitos down, and we had to place
rat bait for the (mouse-sized) rats we have spotted in the kitchen. This
is why people live in high-rise apartments.


Our US shipment arrived 2 nights ago, and with a gift of whiskey cleared
customs with no problem. We are happily unpacking Trader Joe’s truffles
(what a great idea I had!) and slept on our mattress last night (heaven.)
The people I have met through the babies group seem very interesting, and I
have gotten together with some of them individually during the week. I
particularly like a Finnish woman, Annika, who has a baby 6 days younger
than Zoe (and so much fatter!) and her partner Philip from Britain. She
works for UN overseeing refugee camps. They have been all over the world in
hotspots like Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc. We met taking our babies swimming
at a large hotel pool, and now we meet regularly to take them swimming.