We Can Start Our Lives Again

By David Snyder

I have never seen devastation on the scale of what I witnessed in Asia. For nearly a month I traveled between India and Sri Lanka, where in total more than 90,000 people lost their lives. Peering down from the window of an airplane on my way to Sri Lanka, it looked as though the coastline had been peeled back like a sardine can, the white strip of naked beach impossibly bright against the azure blue of the sea.

For most, stories of remarkable survival were tempered with tales of tremendous loss. In Galle I met a woman named Kumari who lived barely 30 yards from the edge of the sea, surrounded by the homes of her brothers and their families. When her eldest brother saw the wave coming, he raised the alarm.

"Everyone said 'Run!' And we ran," Kumari said.

Though she and her five children survived the wave that destroyed their home, her brother, his 14-year-old son, and Kumari's aunt and uncle were all killed. Standing nearby in the debris of their home, Kumari's teenaged son stooped to retrieve a red plastic clock from the wreckage at his feet. It was frozen at exactly 9:26 — the instant the wave struck.

That instant sparked an outpouring of global support unmatched in history. As 2004 drew to a close, the world was moved to reach out to those left homeless and orphaned, destitute and traumatized. At our CRS headquarters in downtown Baltimore, a cab driver came in to drop off donations raised by his fares during the course of the day. Checking e-mails in Sri Lanka, I got a message from the mother of an eight-year-old girl named Cassie who had raised more than $10,000 in her community in Tulsa, Okalahoma. If there is a bright spot in this tragedy it must surely be that humanity, in its purest form, is not lost in what seems an increasingly violent and uncertain world.

On one of my last days in Sri Lanka, I set out late one afternoon to walk through some of the worst-affected areas along the coast. Memory is best served, I find, by a few moments of solitude. All along the route, people were working to retrieve their lives from the sea-battered shoreline.

Drawn by the sound of brooms on a wet concrete floor, I peered into a gutted home just off the main street, a few yards from the ocean. Seeing me, a man inside welcomed me in. Around him, his brother and his elderly parents worked to salvage what they could from the mud-caked interior — a few soaked mattresses, a handful of red plastic furniture and a mound of waterlogged books. The man who had beckoned told their story of survival, that no one in the family had been killed.

Sharing the intimacy of that small room, I asked what he would do now that everything was lost. The weariness of the last several weeks heavy on his face, he looked around briefly, then turned to me.

"We can start our lives again with a table and some chairs," he said.

David Snyder is a writer and photographer who has traveled to more than 30 countries with CRS. Most recently, David visited country programs in South Africa and East Africa, including Tanzania.