2 years after tsunami, normalcy remains elusive

updated 6:37 p.m. ET Dec. 23, 2006

This is another in an occasional series of reports tracking one Sri Lankan family and their village in the aftermath of the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami.

PERALIYA, Sri Lanka - At nightfall, quiet descends quickly on the narrow street that runs through the center of this seaside village. On unpaved side roads, many windows remain dark. In house after newly built house scattered across Peraliya, no one is around to turn on the lights.

That is when it becomes clear just how much this village has lost: Not just from the tsunami that killed 249 villagers two years ago, but in the slow drain of villagers since then.

“It’s so quiet here now,” said Sriyawathi Malani Gunathilaka, whose 19-year-old son was among the nearly 230,000 people who died in a dozen countries when the tsunami roared in from the ocean on Dec. 26, 2004. Officials say almost half of the 410 Peraliya families who survived have since gone elsewhere.

To the core of villagers who remain, it seems most everyone has moved away.

“Sometimes, it seems worse now than right after the tsunami,” said Gunathilaka, 56, the matriarch of a small family trying to hold itself together since the death of its only son, Pradeep, and the destruction of its small home. But she plans to stay: “This village is my home.”

Filling empty homes, lives
Two years after the tsunami rewrote life in Peraliya, she and the other remaining villagers are fashioning a sort of normalcy, helped by hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

They do their best to ignore the empty homes, and the memories of a once-tightly knit community.

So they are planting backyard gardens, weaving rope from coconut husks to sell, and taking sewing classes run by small charities. They’re fishing in donated boats and sending their children to donor-built schools. Always, they’re looking for more aid money.

Every couple of weeks, Sriyawathi, 56, takes a bus to the nearest city, Galle, where volunteers teach her about plant care and basic accounting so she can open a small flower nursery.

The work is her solace.

“Everyone around here, all they talk about is the tsunami, and that makes me think about my son. I can’t do anything when I’m thinking about him. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep,” she said. “It’s painful to forget my son, but I don’t want to think about him so much.”

Fear pervades rebuilding
She was sitting by the new home she and her husband have been slowly building, a two-bedroom concrete cottage sitting on top of 13-foot reinforced pillars. Her previous home, paid for by selling vegetables in a nearby market, was destroyed by the waves.

The odds of another tsunami here are minuscule, but she’ll live in nothing less.

“This house has to be strong,” said Gunathilaka, the force in her voice an echo of the determined woman her neighbors once knew.

Tsunami resource guide Tsunamis: What are they? How do they occur? Cross-section of a tsunami Deadly ways of harbor waves Deadliest earthquakes since 1900 Full coverage of 2004 Asian tsunami

She suffered terribly after Pradeep’s death, and for months her nighttime wails woke her neighbors and terrified her two daughters.

“She’s better now,” said her older daughter, Kumudu, 27, who lives nearby with her own small family. The younger daughter, Sujeewa, is at nursing school in the capital, Colombo.

But Sriyawathi’s pain is still there: “We’re lonely,” she said flatly, as her husband sat quietly beside her. He suffered a stroke some years before the tsunami and is largely unable to work.

Peraliya is not an easy place in which to live. Competition for aid began dividing villagers soon after the tsunami, despite an outpouring of international donations that meant everyone here got help.

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