2 years after tsunami, normalcy remains elusive

A surplus of new homes
Two years later, there’s a bitter undertone to most conversations.

“When friends get together, they spend their time saying ’So-and-so got one house, so-and-so got two,’ said Dalawatumulla Gamage Annula, who lives a couple streets over from Sriyawathi. “But we still talk to the people who got so much from the aid groups ... It has to get back to normal.”

While basic post-tsunami payments were set by the government — 100,000 rupees (about $1,000) per dead family member, and 250,000 rupees ($2,500) for a destroyed home — the abundance of aid often led to chaos.

The trouble was magnified in Peraliya, a working-class fishing village where the waves mangled a passing train and killed hundreds of passengers. The wreckage, which became a vivid international image of the tsunami’s toll, attracted gawkers, beggars and people looking to help.

While most aid groups tried to dole out resources carefully, Peraliya got everything from truckloads of free sewing machines to tourists distributing cash.

There was also the chance of building extra homes.

“There are very few people from the village who don’t have a house now, and there are some families who have two,” said Anura Abewardena, until recently the top local official. So many extra houses, he said, explain all the empty ones.

Resentment among the well-to-do
The biggest changes happened along the village’s coast road, where dozens of extended fishing families had lived in now-destroyed shanties. Post-tsunami regulations restricted rebuilding within 110 yards of the shoreline, forcing the construction of new inland communities for coastal residents.

But the shifting of so many lives created opportunities for manipulation. According to Abewardena, many extended families who had shared one home were able to get multiple houses, while others accepted homes inland, then persuaded aid groups to build second houses elsewhere.

Today, nearly everyone in Peraliya — from the poorest villagers to the comparatively well-off — believes he was shortchanged.

“People who didn’t have much before the tsunami are now happy,” said Annula. Her husband, who died recently after a prolonged illness, had once been a successful fishermen, and they had raised their four sons in a comfortable house with a large yard. “People like me who were doing better, we only got the minimum like everyone else.”

Few people, though, admit to being happy.

Sriyawathi is an observant Buddhist and believes her son, who was swept away as he tried to help an elderly village woman, has been reborn into a new life since the tsunami.

Every night, she meditates and prays.

“I pray that he will never again have another death like that one,” she said. Then she looked at her visitors and asked: “Will he?”

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