Life goes on for resilient Sri Lankans

SRI LANKA: The "Queen of the Sea" is back on track. In a powerful symbol of Sri Lanka's determination to move on, the train in which 1,481 hapless souls were trapped and died on the west coast, has been reassembled with blood, sweat and cranes and set back on the railroad where it was stationed on December 26th. It stands now exactly as it stood that morning,before its eight carriages were thrown around like toys and the 85-tonne engine hurled 200 metres away into the trees. Kathy Sheridan reports from Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka

The carriages are desperately cracked and battered and the engine appears to be beyond repair. The odour of rotting flesh, which permeates the entire area, has forced even the pacing, praying Buddhist monks to wear face-masks.

In any western place, this would have become a shrine by now. But in a place where people had so little to begin with, life must go on.

One of the few structures still standing beside the track is a brand new house belonging to a German who married Katic, a local woman. Intended for tourist rentals, she says, it was to be their pension. This family survived because their house was built to rock-solid construction standards and because when the wave pounded towards them, they managed to punch their way through the roof and climb on to it.

From there, they had a life-altering close-up of the tsunami's murderous assault on "The Queen of the Sea". After the first wave, they saw Sinqumudu Pryantha racing from his house 300 metres away on the beach with his wife and two-year-old girl and hand them up to the guard on the train for safe keeping. Then he ran back home for his two other girls, aged 11 and 9. There was no sign of them. Just ahead of the second wave, he raced back towards the train, and climbed onto Katic's roof, thinking that at least his wife and youngest child were safe. But he too had a ringside view as the train took the full, crushing impact of the second wave with the screams and agony of the trapped and the doomed.

Today he stands in Katic's house in a dry-eyed daze. He and his one surviving child (a 9-year-old twin who was with an aunt that day) are housed in a temple six miles away but he needs to be here because police have arrived with their cameras for a government assessment of loss and damage. "But I am attracted to this place I need to be here for myself."

In an album belonging to a relative, he has found pictures of a family wedding in which his wife and little girls proudly feature. He points to each of them, his finger stroking each face as he names them and gives their ages. "I am like a raw, green plant in the wind now, blown in every direction that is how I am. I don't know what is to happen to us."

He worked at the harbour, helping with the fish catches. Now he has nothing; no work, no money to buy a plot of land, no hope, only one little girl who refuses to believe that her mother and sisters are not coming back, and a government ration book that entitles him to three kilos of rice a week, lentils, sugar, potatoes and coconut.

A few miles further south, a long, orderly queue of subdued people clutching the same blue ration book snakes down a busy street.

Further on, past well-loved tourist magnets like the coral gardens in the village of Hikkaduwa, lies the only restaurant still functioning for 20 kilometres. The Refresh was one of the most famous in Sri Lanka, providing catering for about 250 lunches - mostly for German and English tourists - as well as being official caterers for such prestigious clients as the Galle international cricket ground.

That was until December 26th, when the waves pounded through the beautiful beach-side haven, with its antique chairs, tables, state-of-the-art cookery facilities, computers and sound systems. The owner, Upali, managed to get his family to high ground before returning that day to view the devastation. "Half of the restaurant was in the sea, the other half was on the railway line." The first thing he did was liberate about 15kg of live lobsters from the restaurant tanks and return them to the sea - "at least someone was happy", he says wryly.

He has no insurance; his determination to use traditional materials such as thatched roofing made it too difficult and, anyway, it probably wouldn't have covered a tsunami risk. But Upali's grit is evident.

With dozens of friends, he salvaged what he could on the 26th. The next day, some 30 to 40 of them were back with wheelbarrows and shovels, "filling in" the beach (which had dropped away by two feet), clearing the muck and debris from the interior, and - most difficult of all - using hammers to break up the huge chunks of concrete wall which stood between him and the grim-looking hotel next door, before carting as much of it away as they could manage.

Their week-long efforts have paid off. Though the sea insists on dropping debris back on it, Upali's little strip of beach is the only one that is virtually clear. His restaurant is open and is already catering for about 50 lunches a day.

At 42, Upali is resigned to starting all over again. The goodwill around him is palpable. But the fates have conspired to deal him what may be a crippling blow.

Last February, he spent $100,000 on a plot of beach on which he intended to build a hotel. In a land where a lobster dinner can be had for about $5, it's a vast amount of money.

Upali's problem is that the government has now banned any new construction anywhere on the beach side of the railway line.

"This is not a practical suggestion. What tourists come for is to be on the beach, to eat on the beach," he says.

That may be so but a law forbidding such construction was already in place long before the tsunami. Politicians, fearful of losing votes, simply never enforced it, which explains why so many poor people ended up living along the coast in barely habitable huts.

According to one lawyer here, some 95 per cent of lives lost could have been avoided if a series of laws relating to coastal conservation had been observed and enforced.

Like many others in Sri Lanka, he is pessimistic about the chances of the massive foreign aid trickling down to those in need. "I know the government is getting much aid from the outside, but there is so much corruption. Politicians will always try to take such money for themselves."