From PEOPLE Magazine
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Dr. Ruvan Samarasinghe had just delivered a baby girl by cesarean section and was preparing to sew up the incision when a panicked nurse burst into the operating room of the hospital in Galle, Sri Lanka, with the news: A giant wave was about to hit. Samarasinghe, 35, assumed the nurse was just overreacting to choppy seas along the coast, just a dozen yards from the hospital. But then, he recalls, "someone shouted that a wall had collapsed and the water was coming in."
On the operating table, new mother Rohini De Silva—bleeding and numbed by anesthetics, but conscious—heard the shouting. Then the lights went out. "I begged them to help me and my baby," says De Silva, 26. "I was asking God to save me." Though Samarasinghe's own wife and infant son were in the staff quarters of the same hospital's first floor, he reassured De Silva and kept on working, feeling his way in the dark to determine where to suture. "I felt like a blind person," he says. For 20 minutes he kept stitching as the ocean water demolished nearby hospital walls and employees and patients fled. Meanwhile, medical staff tended to the baby in the dark, using a syringe to clear her mouth instead of the usual electric-powered suction equipment.
Once the surgery was complete, a couple of other remaining staffers helped De Silva and 5-lb. newborn Angela Shahani reach a nearby temple from which an ambulance took them to a hospital outside town. De Silva's parents, five sisters and one brother assumed she had been killed until someone from the hospital called that night to say she'd had the baby. Her husband, Sharman Prasad, 31, who works in a hotel 2,000 miles away in Dubai, rushed back to Galle. Shattered by the sight of the city—"Everything is broken, everyone else is crying," he says—he was filled with relief at the sight of Rohini and Angela, now living in her parents' inland home. "I am happy my wife is here," he says. "I am happy for my baby."
What Will Happen to the Children?
It's morning in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, and in a makeshift refugee camp 20 children sit cross-legged on the floor still and silent, staring up at something they may never have seen: a 34-year-old American woman. "Too quiet," Tammie Willcuts, humanitarian operations specialist for Save the Children, mutters with a frown. The children had lived in an orphanage destroyed by the great wave and escaped inland on foot, the older ones carrying the younger. Willcuts stumbled across their camp within days of arriving in Sri Lanka from her home in Warrenton, Va., and realized they had so far received little aid. She immediately went to a store to buy crayons, badminton sets, new clothes—more hygienic and dignified than cast-offs, she says—and 35 pairs of flip-flops. Yanna, 11, admires his newly outfitted foot and proclaims, "I am very happy."
These days, in this place, that is an astonishing achievement. UNICEF says the tsunami has left 1.5 million children orphaned, homeless, sick or starving. Some are in refugee camps, others on the streets. "We were just in Sri Lanka, where there may be 3,000 orphaned children in the north—that's just one section of the country," says Marissa Buckanoff of UNICEF. Adds the Christian Children Fund's Ellie Whinnery: "Kids are wandering around with blank stares. Just walking around, searching for parents and siblings."
With those children at their most vulnerable, a different set of terrors—these man-made—threatens. In Indonesia authorities fear that some of the nation's homeless and orphaned children are being smuggled out of the country by child traffickers to be sold for labor or into the sex trade. In response the government has banned children under 16 from leaving the province of Aceh. From Sri Lanka come reports that parents left childless by the catastrophe are unofficially adopting orphaned children. And Thai police are investigating reports that a 12-year-old Swedish boy may have been kidnapped from a hospital near Khao Lak. "How many children have been abducted, nobody knows," says Mike Kiernan of Save the Children.
The task for child-welfare agencies is to register kids and, at best, connect them with relatives or family friends. Until then the goal is to create safe temporary homes, providing food, clothing and emotional support. Not least, the challenge is to help them be kids again, as Willcuts notes, handing out crayons and tennis balls to the wide-eyed group: "The way to promote normalcy is to have them do normal things—like play."
A Mother's Agonizing Choice: Which Child to Save
When the monster wave swept through the grounds of the Holiday Inn Resort near Phuket, Thailand, Australian tourist Jillian Searle was poolside with sons Lachie, 5, and Blake, 2. The water, which quickly surged up to Searle's neck, was too powerful for her to hold onto both boys without all three of them drowning. "I could feel him squeezing me," she told Australia's Channel Nine television of her older son, who could not swim. "And he said to me, 'Don't let go of me, Mummy.' " But—hoping to save at least one of her children and thinking that the older one had a better chance at survival—Searle tore Lachie's hand from hers, pleading, "Someone take my son!"
Nearby, Alyce Morgan, 17, was fighting for her own life. But the Australian teenager, on vacation with her family, grabbed Lachie and struggled onto the top of a bar counter, trying desperately to keep his head above water. When Morgan felt herself being pulled under, she, too, let him go. "That was one of the hardest things I have ever done," she later told Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
Witnessing the entire scene from a second-floor hotel balcony, Searle's husband, Bradley, rushed downstairs to help—but was blocked by a wall of water. When it finally receded, he found Jillian and Blake hanging onto beach furniture near the pool. Together, they frantically searched the devastated area for Lachie, fearing the worst. "There is no way I can live my life knowing that I took his hand off mine," Jillian told her husband. Hours later, they rejoiced when they discovered he had survived. Tossed along by the current, Lachie had grabbed onto a still-standing lobby door. After clinging to it for two hours, he was discovered by a security guard and carried to safety. Reunited with him and back in their home city of Perth, the Searles are counting their blessings—and keeping both boys close. Says Bradley: "You never want to let them out of your sight."
Finding Hasani, a Family's Lone Survivor
P.D.T. Amaradasa was safe at home in the town of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, when he got word of the devastating waves that had struck the island nation's shores. He panicked, knowing that at that very moment his daughter, her husband and their two young daughters were en route to visit relatives—aboard a train that skirted the country's picturesque coastline. But with roads destroyed by the tsunami, it would have been impossible to find them. "I was helpless," says the grandfather, 60, a widower who makes a modest living selling used furniture. "I didn't know whether they were alive or dead."
The prospects were bleak: Waves had overtaken the train, trapping more than 1,300 people in its eight passenger cars and killing most of them. Traveling by motorbike to hospitals and relief camps in the days that followed, Amaradasa was devastated to discover the bodies of his daughter and son-in-law on Dec. 28.
Still, he kept showing photographs of his granddaughters to anyone who would look, until on Dec. 30 a policeman recognized 372-year-old Hasani and reunited the pair in a hospital. "I was shouting and crying, and she was also crying," says Amaradasa. "She saw me and said, I have a grandfather, and I love him.' "(There is no sign of her sister Nona, 8.) "Now I am happy for Hasani," says Amaradasa, "though every night I pray for the people who died."
Volunteers Help Families to Identify Lost Loved Ones
White clouds of smoke from dry ice hover inches above the ground at the Yan Yao Buddhist temple in Takua Pa, Thailand, where the last of the day's decomposed bodies wait in the open air to be tagged. Dressed in a yellow surgical robe, plastic apron, goggles, rubber boots and a breathing mask, Dr. Luba Matic struggles with a young boy's humerus bone, attempting to remove a DNA sample so that someone might one day identify him. A 6'5" Serb who moved to Thailand two years ago for the warm climate, he had worked with little sleep since the moment the tsunami hit, tending first the wounded, then the dead. At 32, Matic had witnessed death and atrocity in his homeland. "But this is the most horrifying," he says of the hundreds of bodies brought daily to the temple. "At this kind of moment you wonder why you studied medicine."
But there is a reason why Matic and many other foreigners and locals have come to places like this in each devastated area: "We have seen many die," says Joy Pharadee, 28, a Thai sales administrator who traveled from outside Bangkok. "We want to help their relatives bring their bodies home."
Paige Fowler and Chris Pedersen, both 22 and friends from California, had been teaching English in a remote Thai town for only two days when they answered an Internet plea for volunteers and ended up in Takua Pa, nearly 900 miles to the south. "I'm so afraid of biology and blood—I can't believe I'm here," says Fowler. Neither had seen a dead body before, but now they stood under a banyan tree among 500 bags of human remains. They packed rotting corpses in dry ice so they might be preserved and identified. The images of the day stay with them as they attempt to sleep on the floor of a hospital with scores of other aid workers. "I saw a 5-or 6-year-old girl with her hands on her head in a fetal position," Pedersen says. "I can't imagine her last 'We have seen many die. We want to help their relatives bring their bodies home' moments of being alive. You see bodies that seem like they were crawling, reaching for something.
"At the end of the day," he added in an e-mail, "I am mentally and physically exhausted. But I'd rather feel this way for the rest of my life than lose a loved one like so many have."
One Man Takes In 230 Refugees
Watching from the third floor of his family's five-bedroom home as the deluge destroyed his native village of Lampaseh, Indonesia, Aminullah Usman prepared to die. "I thought my time on earth was up," says the 47-year-old bank president, a devout Muslim. "I told everyone to receive God's will."
The disaster took the lives of all but about 260 of the 2,000 residents of the Sumatran coastal hamlet, but Usman, wife Nurmiati and their five children survived, and then he reached out to help others, opening the doors of his modest two-bedroom summer home six miles inland. The first night, 40 people—25 of them with severe injuries-packed the one-story concrete house, sleeping crisscrossed on mats on the tiny living-room floor and outside. Says Usman: "I told them all, 'You are my family now. This is your home. Stay as long as you like.' "
Word of his generosity spread so quickly that within two days he had taken in 230 people, including more than 60 children, housing some in two tents in the yard. Many had lost their entire immediate families. Usman designated a cooking and cleaning staff, spending thousands of his own dollars to pay for bottled water, rice, noodles and vegetables. At night the refugees share their stories of survival and heartbreak. "I have nowhere to go," says Arnita Husen, 32, a homemaker who lost her parents, three sisters and only daughter to the giant waves. "Mr. Usman is a good man with a big heart."
So large, in fact, that he has turned no one away. "If 100 more refugees show up on my doorstep, they are welcome," he says. Hardly immune to the tragedy--he has lost six close relatives and dozens of cousins--he is merely responding to the devastation by trying to offer hope. "This is not the end of life," says Usman. "We still have a lot of living to do."
A Father Ties His Family to a Tree to Save Them
Dec. 26 was Stephen Boulton's 34th birthday, and the volunteer fireman turned plumber and his family were spending it worlds away from the gloomy Scottish winter—at the Kandooma Island Resort in the Maldives. As they sunned themselves on a jetty that morning, the water began rising ominously high. Boulton told his wife, Ray, 34, to grab 20-month-old daughter Iona and get to land. Meanwhile, he took their boys—Ashley, 12, and Euan, 4—and helped them to the beach as the sea swallowed the jetty. "The water was so strong," Boulton says. "We knew if any of us put a foot wrong, it would sweep us under."
The Boultons made it to the grounds of their hotel. "After about five minutes, the tide shot back as far as you could see, as if someone pulled the plug," says Ray. "I was so relieved." But her husband didn't like what he was seeing. Stephen helped his family 15 to 20 feet up a palm tree, using beach towels to tie each child to a branch. "When I saw the second wave coming, it was like the whole sea was heading our way," Ray says. "I remember thinking, at least we were all going to die together."
Below them, the tsunami roared through, carrying a churning mass of furniture, oil drums and other debris. "It sped past within inches of us," Ray recalls. "People had clambered onto roofs, but as buildings gave way, we could see them swept out to sea." When the worst had passed, Stephen left his family in the tree for another three hours just to be safe, while he climbed down and pitched in to help the injured. "I never thought for a second we wouldn't be okay," he says. "From the moment it all started going crazy, I had worked out every possible scenario--and solutions. That's just the way I am."
After Three Days, a Dad Reunites with His Son
He touched hearts around the world, a tiny blond ray of hope amid the horror. Twenty-month-old Hannes Bergstrom's family was lounging by the pool when the killer wave hit their Khao Lak, Thailand, resort. The water ripped Hannes from his grandfather's arms, and his grieving family assumed he was lost. But hours later an American couple found a dazed Hannes in the care of Thai survivors. On Dec. 29 he was reunited with his father, Marko Karkkainen, 33, in a Phuket hospital. "Big, stupid wave," the boy said. Now home in Sweden, Marko, an electrician, remains hospitalized for leg wounds, and Hannes stays with his grandparents. "He's happy, lively and joking," says his aunt Viola Hellstrom. Hannes has no concept that his mother, Suzanne, 32, is presumed dead. Still, says her sister Viola, "I'm just so happy he is alive. It feels like I haven't lost her entirely. A part of her is still here."
- Contributors:
- Karen Emmons,
- Ken Lee,
- Joanna Nathan,
- Courtney Rubin,
- Melenie Ambrose,
- Hope Hamashige,
- Sara Hammel,
- Neil Michael,
- Linda Kramer,
- Susan Mandel,
- Sofia Larsson.
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