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