| Vincent Hogan, Irish Independent, 23 December 2006
VINCENT HOGAN visits eastern Sri Lanka, where the aid agency GOAL is making good use of the Irish people's €20 million donation by rebuilding the island ruined by the killer waves
On Beach Road, nothing is built facing the ocean any more. It is as if Sainthamaruthu turns a granite collar up against the water's heartless, shimmering gaze, feigning disinterest in the secrets it holds.
The long, crumpled mile of coastline is still speckled with eerie remnants: the splintered ghost of a fishing boat, the stern little sentry-line of obsolete wells where houses stood, the stark, charcoal remains of coconut trees stripped of all blossom and life by the salty wave that crashed right over them.
The wall around the cemetery is painted Muslim green and stamped with the GOAL insignia. The new, ochre-coloured fisheries building stands airy and impatient for March and a new season. But everything else is in retreat here, facing inland and compressed into a slim and dementedly busy ribbon of land, caught tight between the sea and the paddy fields.
Only the three-storey Sea Breeze Hotel, so defiantly garish in green and yellow, holds firm on the beach-front. Fifty people survived here when the tsunami came shuddering in, saved by the height of the building and the protection of two houses - now nothing more than twin husks - positioned to its front.
The proprietor, Mohammad Yusof Jaufar, lost six members of family to the wave, including his father, whose hand reached out to his just as the great wall of water came upon them. "It pushed straight through us and I lost my grip," he recalls with a defeated air that frames so many stories around this part of Sri Lanka's eastern coastline.
Mohammad's own life was spared by the good fortune of being swept onto a tree, a refuge he clamped himself onto for half an hour, until the swell abated.
This is the Ampara district, a place so remote that aid workers did not arrive until two weeks after the Indian Ocean had reaped such unimaginable savagery on the people of South East Asia.
Those aid workers were wearing GOAL shirts. What they came upon was a community left with nothing. Over 3,500 people were lost to this town, some swept away to unmarked oblivion in the sea itself, others crushed in the warren of narrow streets that were turned into open sluice gates by the pummeling water on St. Stephen's Day two years ago.
Victor Raja was on the beach with friends, looking to catch sardines and butterfish. He remembers the water as "so big and dark-coloured and the force of it was amazing." He says: "I was running and then it hit me. I will never forget the screaming and crying just after. I ended up in the lagoon. I can't believe I didn't die."
Those who survived saw their lives change almost at a molecular level. One of the GOAL drivers today, Amir, lost 207 members of his extended family. Another, Nafar, observes the forsaken foundations of a house, then points to a spot maybe fifty yards away where a five ton slab of roofing lies discarded like unwanted kindling.
"My roof," he sighs sadly. All around, the confetti of chaos remains uncollected. Small, smashed memorials to lost lives. Fragments of furniture. Mottled plastics. Scraps of fabric. No one is allowed tobuild within 100 yards of the beach now. No one wants to.
At least once a week, some idiot soothsayer comes running from the water, yelling tasteless nonsense about "another wave". There was a time such mischief triggered panic. Now the locals just draw down the blinds on their emotions and get on with living.
Up in the odorous main street, we sit into a jeep and drive southward, parallel to the coast. Suddenly, the landscape brightens. Every second building is new, the same, circular insignia imprinted in so much of the fresh concrete. This stretch is known locally today as 'The GOAL mile'.
We sweep in past workmen to the Al Jalal school, the cramped, old yellow building now dwarfed by two, big three-storey blocks that, come next May, will be connected by a glass walkway. The juxtaposition between old and new is startling. This is just one of 62 schools being built by GOAL in Sri Lanka, more than 30 of them already completed.
Not far away, the Riyal Jenna school - flattened by the tsunami - has been relocated and re-invented as another impressive three-storey block, equipped with the most modern facilities, including computers. GOAL's work stretches right down the coast and around the southern curve of Sri Lanka into the Matara and Hambantota districts.
They have built houses, roads, bridges and vocational training centres. They have sunk wells. They have initiated self-help programmes, nudging the embattled locals back towards self-sufficiency. But it is here, in remote Ampara, that the scale of their work is most startling.
By May, it is estimated that 33,000 children will be facilitated in GOAL-built schools, an achievement that beggars belief given the environment in which so much of the construction has been undertaken. This is all thanks to the staggering €20 million donated by the people of Ireland to GOAL's tsunami relief fund. The agency has spent nearly €17 million of that money in Sri Lanka, the country where it could be most effectively spent, and the rest of the fund will be spent by May.
However, Sri Lanka remains a country haplessly scarred by civil war, despite the illusory ceasefire agreed between Government and the rebel Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) almost four years ago.
North of Ampara, in Trincomalee, the fighting is full-blooded and unambiguous. Already this year, more than 3,500 lives have been lost to the war. Ethnic tension fizzes endlessly and explosively, sometimes in the most unpredictable of ways. On Wednesday of last week, an aid lorry collided with a motorized rickshaw in Ampara, killing a man.
Confronted by angry locals, the driver tried to flee and, in his terror, ran down two pedestrians, injuring both fatally. While he subsequently escaped, his assistant was not so lucky. The locals beat him up, set fire to the truck, then threw him into
© Irish Independent
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