British Red Cross communications delegate Jessica Barry travelled to Sri Lanka shortly after the tsunami that struck on Boxing Day 2004. Apart from the devastation, what made the biggest impression on her was the stoicism of the people she met. She recalls:
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“In the schools that had been turned into welfare shelters, families had marked out small squares of floor space, using classroom benches or desks to establish what had effectively become 'home'. They had tried to create a little privacy by hanging up saris or sarongs, and sat carefully unpacking their Red Cross relief parcels, so as to bring a small sense of normality back into their upturned lives.
“Only one person of the many I spoke to broke down in tears when recounting his story. This was an old man in Batticaloa in the east who had been in church when the waves roared up the lagoon where his house stood, engulfing it completely. He waded home through chest-high water, his son clinging to his back, to find his wife hanging on to the bars of a window to save herself from drowning. They all escaped with their lives, but lost everything they owned.
“Even very young children stood dry-eyed as they recounted horror stories of seeing friends and siblings washed away, or torn from their grasp.
“Parents filled out tracing requests for lost children, and spoke calmly of their last moments together. It was terrible to hear such stories and to see so little outward emotion but to know that, inside, they were breaking apart.
“Along the way, I visited Red Cross offices. Everywhere I went, I found colleagues working at full stretch, as they had been since the first moment. Sri Lanka Red Cross volunteers and staff, who were distributing relief parcels, making tracing visits to the camps and providing other services, were hugely impressive. Many of them had lost friends or relatives or possessions to the waves and were themselves living in welfare centres. Others had cancelled planned trips or given up holidays to help out.
“I came away saddened, wondering, inspired, questioning, glad to have been able to be there but wishing that it had never been necessary. I carried away tales of near-escapes, of horrors, of what people called miracles, and a better understanding of the smallness of man and his petty ways compared with nature and her ability to overpower us all.”
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