Evacuated

(At the beginning of the week, I had written a novella to post that has somehow disappeared....all of us who use computers know this feeling, and as the saying goes-it's never as good as the first time)

I was drying my hair in the bathroom. You look forward to this shower all day, beginning about 2 hours after your morning shower, as the first layer of sweat dries sticky on your skin, then the second layer, then the third. Then the hot sun in the dusty camps, then when the sun goes down the mosquito bites on your ankles and insides of your elbows. The one thing I've splurged in on this trip is really fancy bath things, which has been a salvation in ridding my sleep of nasty places I've been. This is the loveliest time of the day.

Indica knocked on my door. Did you hear, he said. Let me guess, tsunami is coming. "There was an earthquake in Sumatra", he said. Behind him, an old woman was hyperventilating in a chair. I stuck my head out the door. I walked to the balcony and looked downstairs. The night was just like any of the earlier tsunami scares. Talk about it. Meals left half finished on the tables. News on really loud on all TVs. People packing and running inland. I had grown used to this, and did not notice. Until Nelson, our supervisor at IOM, knocked on our door and said, "Ladies, we're mobile".I looked again on the veranda. The french NGO also staying at our hotel were all at the edge of the beach, trying to get phone service (Telecoms Sans Frontiers, they offer phone service during disasters to help people find their lost loved ones), and not getting any. people running around. People squinting at the sea. Mayhem had begun. Everyone was carrying their things upstairs or out the door.

My father always said to me that I should always keep a small bag by the door. I always thought this was psycho-paranoia. But somehow in these early of the later years, you find more and more that you've listened to the things your parents tell you to do, despite how much you fought them just a short time ago. And though my small runaway bag was not fully packed, it did cut a good 10 minutes from our flight. The funny thing is, I felt no sense of panic. It was natural to me that I may never ever see this room again, that I would go with only this bag, and may be living with only this for a long time from now. Shit, iI thought, I had just washed all my underwear and it was wet, hanging on the clothesline on the balcony. Bad time to have no clean panties. Passport, Wallet, Phone. Change of clothes. Sneakers for bad ground, rain jacket, sarong, bandana, toothbrush, ipod, speakers, laptop. Firstaidkit and basic toiletries already always live in the right hand pocket. This is how I grew up, and In such a bizarre way I felt at home, the most familiarity I had felt in a long time. One minute, you are washing your hair, the next minute, you're in a speeding van, getting as far away from where you are, as quickly as possible. I felt like a kid again. Immediate flight. I had done this many times before.

The driver was panting, driving like a madman. We had to calm him down to drive slowly. But his reply to Nelson telling him to calm down was in Sinhala, I couldn't understand it but it sounded something like "Shut the fuck you stupid whiteys got no idea what kind of shit I seen so I'm gonna drive I'm gonna drive fast and I'm gonna drive psycho and there's no way in heaven or hell I'm gonna be anywhere near that beach". The roads were full of people running inland, carrying small bags. No phone service, but periodically getting calls from all the locals I had met checking where I was, and asking if we could get any news from our country that was reliable. We went to the IOM office, and finally got onto BBC streaming news. It was a land based earthquke- not to worry, someone said. Only 7.5. Only 8.3 Three hundred dead. One thousand dead. Everyone had a different story. We were huddled in a semicircle glued to the little PC screen. When we saw the map on the pixelated window, and saw the little waves coming from the same epicenter as we saw it on the news in December, I have to say a chill ran through the room. That our relief work would turn back into emergency work, that rebuilding homes would go back to clearing bodies off the street. We were instructed from Colombo to wait several hours, or find a place far from the beach to sleep.

At about 1:30 AM the seven of us went to the Solis hotel, a tall monstrosity far from the ocean, where there was one room free. Going up the stairs, the corridors were filled with people curled up on the marble floors. I found two leather chairs in the fourth floor lobby. I pushed them together under a ceiling fan. I rolled up my rainjacket in the bandana, spread my trusty sarong over the chairs, and curled up into an uneasy sleep that never quite happened. All night I heard screeching tires from the street outside of buses swerving to take each other over, honking like madmen. Mosquitos all over me. And 4 times in the night, I looked up to find some strange guy looking over me. I didn't sleep since the second one at about 3 AM. And at 6 AM, with my phone's inbox filled with all the loving texts from friends back home writing to see If I was ok, I looked out the window onto a dry street. Took the IOM van back, changed my clothes, and went into the office.

Isadeen town was in a daze. Everyone had either left or barely slept. When I went to the camps, the feeling was eerie. Even in the camps on high ground several kilometers from the ocean, people retreated to tall buildings. The town was covered in an grey cloud that day, as if they had all remembered their screams, their dead, their homes, and everything they had lost, the fear of losing the little they had left.

My tuktuk driver back to the Beach Inn that day was Sumith. A small, smiley, balding man. "I see you ,IOM office" he says. He lives in Polhena, the village right beside ours, which was completely destroyed. The way people described it, Polhena was like Venice beach, where people in surrounding areas went on the weekends to watch sunsets and hold hands and take pictures and throw their classmates into the ocean after graduation. Now, no one is in the sea. Not a soul. Sumith pointed to where his house once was. He told me that you used to not be able to see the ocean from this part of the road. Today, I could see it perfectly, as the second wave had levelled everything in its way. "My wife and son, I lose them in tsunami. My restaurant. All is finished. But my tuktuk, tuktutk is broken December 24, so I bring to garage inland. So now I still can work, I live with my brother. Government no help, no give me nothing. No say nothing. My wife and son, my restaurant. Small restaurant. All is finished. Last night, they say tsunami, I drive all people who wants go away from beach. All night I am driving, back to beach, away from beach." Back at the Beach Inn, I caught up a little on sleep, and even the next day, people were still out of town. My translator's mother called her every hour to see where she was an warned her not to go near the sea. Locals called me and asked me to stay in their inland homes, that Madihe is still not safe.

The next night, there was Pirit (all night Buddhist prayer) half a block from the Beach inn. All night, the monks and mourners chanted over a loudspeaker, praying for their dead. There is only one volume setting in India and Sri Lanka - F*CKING LOUD. When I first heard it, it was interesting to me, I was curious what they were saying, almost romanticized it the way a tourist does when you see praying monks at the temple. But come 3AM, the voices were eerie and deafening. After the last days of fear, chaos, trauma, and sleeplessness in Matara, I began to understand what had really happened here. It was the first time we had heard true wailing, deep pain. It seems everyone we met had just told us their story in such a matter of fact way, perhaps because we did not share this experience with them. Imagine having an intense story to tell that has affected your life in a way that it will never be the same again. Imagine if everyone in your life and every new person in your life already knew that story, and didn't want to hear it. Remember how tired you were of hearing the word "tsunami" come February, even though you lived a thousand miles away. With the deafening chants, slow and low pitched over the speakers, treble turned all the way up and piercing my ears, I heard their experience through something different than a story or a picture of a crying baby or even the houses torn apart on the street, as if I began to understand it even just a little more.

In the morning, the air was heavy with incense smoke, and the chanting continued. I thought of all the mornings when the sun had come up after I had been up all night on a school night doing stupid shit like partying or kissing or working to finish something on should have started a long time ago. I thought of they way you get that headeache, that heaviness. The terible tought that now you're screwed, because the day has come and you are not yet finished, and here you are in it, alone in your sleeplessness. I felt this feeling in the air, 100 times stronger, weighed down by the mourning and the loss and the pain and the fear they have lived with the last 3 months, and that they will live with many generations from now. For the first time, I felt a real drive in my stomach to do everything I could to alleviate this pain, even for one person, even for just one hour of a stupid puppet show or drawing pictures or throwing a frisbee or dancing around like an idiot so they could laugh at the wierd foreigner who travelled all the way to this shitty camp to work for no money. Because that morning, their pain, even just the sound of it, was unbearable for me to hear.