Tampa Tribune reporter Monica Scandlen is traveling to Sri Lanka with Tribune photographer Jay Nolan. They will meet up with Tilak Ratnasekera of Tampa, a former Sri Lankan Army major who is returning to his country to help it rebuid after the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami. Read Scandlen's online journal during the trip.

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Hopeful Steps Are Seen

TAMPA - Even though we saw the destruction for days - mile after mile, town after town, camp after camp - the enormity didn’t strike me until we left Sri Lanka.

It will take many, many years to return the country to what it was before the tsunami struck Dec. 26, 2004. If it ever returns. I wonder if a place which saw whole families wiped out can ever REALLY recover.

And yet, we saw small, hopeful steps.

One morning last week in Maggona, along the southern coast, a couple dozen men hauled in a huge fishing net they had thrown out the night before. They chanted and pulled on the net, as if pulling on a tug-of-war rope.

Two people in the community lost homes. No one died. And they were back to fishing, although the fishermen said they are catching much less now than before the tsunami.

In a camp in Tissamaharama, not far from Yala National Park on the country’s southeast coast, a political party called the JVP built two camps with money donated from CARE International. The initials stand for Janatha Vimukthi Prumuna, or People's Liberation Front, a violent rebel group that turned into a popular political party.

The 20 rows of houses, each with five or six units each, sit on sandy lanes.

As children came home from school, dressed in their crisp, white uniforms, an ice-cream seller with the freezer on the back of a motorcycle pulled in. The children screeched with delight and gathered around.

The camp is apparently a popular place for ice-cream vendors. Soon, a second one pulled in, too.

Look for some final thoughts and pictures in the newspaper and on TBO.com, Keyword: Tsunami, in the coming weeks.

Our host, Tilak Ratnasekera, hired a van and a driver, and we left Colombo Thursday morning to head south through the devastated areas.

The Sarvodaya orphanage south of Colombo has a room filled with small children whose ages and names are unknown. JAY NOLAN/Tribune photo

You can see it all on television, but that video doesn't do it justice. Ratnasekera keeps shaking his head and calling it ''colossal damage.''

Every now and then we see tent camps on the side of the road interspersed with piles of debris. Some have banners identifying them as a welfare camps.

The Galle Fort, a remnant of Dutch occupation and built in the 1600s, seemed completely undamaged. It reminded us of the hurricanes in Florida - you'll see just an empty foundation slab next door to a house that is fine. You'll see yards of damaged train tracks followed by tracks that seem fine.

Our host is overwhelmed at the sight of his homeland. He's really annoyed that things aren't happening faster and keeps saying, ''Why aren't they working? Why aren't they working?''

In our 13 hours on the road, we saw miles and miles of tent camps but only a couple of places where workers were shoveling bricks. We only saw a few bulldozers.

The roads were bad before the tsunami - now they're even worse, and we only went 150 miles in those 13 hours. Ratnasekera stopped twice to pray at Buddhist temples important to him. Our journey took us past Hambantota, where he wants to help rebuild houses, to Kataragama, where he wants to pray Friday morning.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Tilak Ratnasekera had been in Colombo about 17 hours, but still hadn’t seen any signs of tsunami damage. Not that he expected to. Most of the communities that took a direct hit are miles south of the capital.

But he had heard that the Dehiwala train station had been washed away. He lived in Dehiwala and asked a nephew to drive him by Wednesday evening.

"Oh it’s still here," Ratnasekera said. "What a relief."

Trains were so packed that people hung out the doors. That’s how it is on buses, too. Especially during rush hour.

Thursday, Ratnasekera, who traveled here from Tampa to help relief efforts, heads south to survey damage for the first time and maybe try to find friends who live in the affected areas. He hasn’t heard from them since the tsunami hit Dec. 26.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Like so many places in Florida, much of life here flows with the water: the canals, the rivers, the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka is an island and water is all around.

Tuesday, we visited Mattakkuliya, a poor neighborhood north of downtown Colombo, which depends on the Kelani River. People who still have their jobs in nearby factories make about $1 a day. But many were either fishermen who lost their boats or market vendors who sell fish at the fish market in Colombo.

One of the many homes destroyed in the Kadaranawawtha area of Mattakkuliya in Colombo. JAY NOLAN/Tribune photo

People bathe in the river, wash their clothes in the river. Children used to play in the river, but since the tsunami struck, many are too scared to go into the water. They use the community water pump now.

Families want to move, even those who make their living from the river.

Anthony Thomas, 49, and his wife, Mary Aganise, 48, lost their small house. It washed away when the tide receded. His fiberglass boat was carried inland with the water. He found the boat and brought it back to where his house used to be, but now is a pile of trash. The boat is nearby, fishing nets still strewn on the bottom. He leaned on the boat, patting it, as we chatted through an interpreter.

A strong swimmer, Thomas saved two teens, ages 13 and 15, from the water the day the tsunami hit. Though he made his living from the river, he doesn’t want to live near it any more.

I asked him what he needs most now to help get his life back together. An engine for his boat, he said. The boat had no major damage, but the engine washed away.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka is still a country at war.

And though the fighting (before a shaky ceasefire) is centered hundreds of miles north and east of here, living in the capital doesn’t take you away from it.

Even simple tasks, like a motorized rickshaw ride to some government buildings, are watched carefully.

After arriving here Monday, photographer Jay Nolan and I headed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get our press credentials. We had a letter from the Sri Lanka Embassy in Washington D.C. directing us where to go.

A vendor prepares items for sale in an open air street market in Colombo. JAY NOLAN/Tampa Tribune

The ministry is near Colombo’s port in a cluster of British colonial buildings, which now house government offices. Unofficially, it’s called Old Colombo. Officially, the area is Colombo 1.

We caught a motorized rickshaw from our nearby hotel and when we told the driver we were headed for Colombo 1, he looked worried. Usually, he is not allowed there, he said, but since we had a letter, he would see how far he could take us.

The fighting has been far away, but suicide bombers with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have long targeted government buildings, crowded markets and train stations in Colombo and government officials. It has been a way of life here long before most Americans learned of al-Quaida’s tactics. The LTTE rebels want for their own homeland.

Approaching Colombo 1, before you see any buildings, there are military checkpoints. Soldiers stand guard in high towers around the port. They walk the streets, too. Camouflage-colored helicopters land in a nearby field.

As we approached the first checkpoint, a soldier stopped our rickshaw. No photos are allowed, he said when Nolan asked to take his picture. The soldier spoke with the rickshaw driver, who told us this is as far as he could go. We would have to transfer to another rickshaw to go any further, the driver said, pointing to a line of about five others across the street.

We hopped out of the first one and got in the second one. That driver explained to us that only drivers and rickshaws with government clearance were allowed to drive around Colombo 1. Security purposes, he said.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - In this bustling capital city, you have to look hard for signs of the deadly tsunami, which hit the Sri Lankan coast almost two months ago.

On board a Sri Lankan Airlines flight, there is no mention of the disaster or the massive aid efforts underway. At the airport about 30 kilometers from our hotel, there are a couple collection boxes.

The tourists are back – at least in Colombo. "Sri Lanka. A Land Like No Other," read the side of a Walker Tours bus loaded with Westerners sitting neatly in their seats and paying close attention to their guide narrating the sights.

The killer wave mainly struck south and east of Colombo along the coast, killing about 30,000 people and leaving almost one million homeless.

Even our taxi driver, Laksman Sisira, did not seem to want to talk about the disaster. He preferred to point out all the changes since I last was here in 1994.

Taxi driver Laksman Sisira. Jay Nolan/Tribune photo

("Is this your first time to Sri Lanka?" is the favored conversation opener.)

For photographer Jay Nolan, it is. I went to my last two years of high school here, graduated in 1989, and made regular visits until my parents moved away in 1995.

McDonald’s fast food restaurants came about two years ago, Sisira said. And had I seen twin towers, about 39 stories each, called the World Trade Center, he asked. Those are new, too, built about five years ago, he said.

And the traffic. So much more traffic now. Too many cars, he said. The roads are too small.

Vans, motorcycles, bicycles, trucks, buses, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws and an occasional cart pulled by a water buffalo share narrow roads. Traffic rules are more like suggestions, which most drivers ignore.

Want to pass a car that’s going too slow? Honk your horn for it to pull over. Want to turn in front of oncoming traffic? Honk again to let others know you’re making the turn.

But there are aid efforts underway, even in the capital. Most of the coordination is here. Some folks displaced from the tsunami have been resettled here.

In the next few days, we’ll assess how the aid effort is going and bring you other stories you may not have heard yet.
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