By John Lancaster Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 4, 2005; Page A08

In Ruined Town, Rebels Outperform Officials

KALMUNAI, Sri Lanka

Past the mountains in the interior, past the long delta of rice fields that stretches into infinity, the rain is falling on the lost, the forgotten and the barely remembered of Kalmunai.

It falls with a deafening roar on the roofs of the refugee camps. It falls on the destroyed homes of the Muslim and Tamil neighborhoods. It falls on the hump of sand near the beach where the dead are buried en masse. And it keeps falling and falling throughout the long gray afternoon, turning the streets into narrow rivers or stagnant swamps.

More than 10,500 people were killed by last week's tsunami along this impoverished, forlorn stretch of Sri Lanka's eastern shore, by far the highest death toll in the nation. It is the most remote, least accessible part of the country, where the towns run into one another along a single narrow road, and there is a distinct Mississippi Delta, middle-of-nowhere feel to it all. Worse yet, this area is often cut off by the intermittent civil war that has plagued the nation for two decades. Those the tsunami claimed were buried soon after, or had been swept out to sea. The survivors here were the quick ones -- or the just plain lucky. But theirs are not stories that end in smiles and hugs and the joy of answered prayers. Instead, in the squalid refugee camps and shattered homes of the town of Kalmunai it would be easier to think more about tomorrow than yesterday if there were a tomorrow to picture. Perhaps it is the fate of many survivors of natural disasters and killing fields the world over -- a dawning understanding that when the horror is over and the shock wears off, life simply goes on and on, often in ways far worse than it did before. Turn off the main drag of this muddy town and wade through the muck and the crumpled houses and power lines lying on the ground, turn to the left, and here, watching the monsoon from the doorway of his ruined home, is Abdul Mohammed Sarrak, a young man of 27. He is lucky, by any measure.

An excavator clears a street devastated by the tsunami in Kalmunai, on Sri Lanka's east coast. (Kieran Doherty - Reuters)

His wife and three young children all happened to be shopping on the main street of the town of 20,000, away from the ocean, and therefore survived. His concrete house is a waterlogged mess, but it is still standing. The latter is striking because everything in front of it -- every single man-made object that once was part of a neighborhood -- has been swept away. There's hardly even rubble. Stand in Sarrak's doorway and you can count whitecaps on the ocean swells, perhaps 800 yards away.

Next door used to be his small restaurant.

It is now a pond.

He comes out into the rain and picks up a long stick. He pushes it into the stagnant brown water. Four feet, it goes down. Five. Now six. The stick finally stops.

"The ocean came up from under it, blew it into the sky," he explains, pointing first up into the air, and then to piles of broken bricks lying half buried in the sand. "We are alive. But we have no food, no money." Is he starting over? Cleaning up? No? What is he doing today?

"Watching the rain," he says, with an attempted smile. "There is nothing else I can do."

Walk along the coast -- it is mile after mile of destruction -- and, during the brief lull in the rain, all you see are scattered clusters of people, in twos and threes, looking over mounds of rubble. They make the pilgrimage to the beach, walk back home. As opposed to the country's tourist-rich southern tip, the people here have subsisted on rice mills and fishing, and selling cooking oil, flour, fabrics and so on to one another. And as opposed to that tourist-rich south, there are no major cleanup projects here, little or no equipment.

But making his way through the debris is another lucky man, jewelry store owner Farouk Nufias. His shop was far enough inland not to be damaged. He and fellow shop owners are dealing only with the sand and the filth and the feared outbreak of disease and the fact that nearly 200,000 people in the region have suddenly been shifted to refugee camps.

Unlucky? You want unlucky?

That would be fishermen, of whom there are no more in Kalmunai.

"I could open my shop, but there is no reason to," Nufias says. "All the people are very sad. No one is going to have any money for a very long time." A few miles away, in the hospitals and refugee camps, there are astonishingly few injured. Fewer than 130, according to the official count.

Sathasivam Nagapooshani, a doctor and one of the only aid workers to make it into the region so far, pauses between seeing adults with scratches and children with coughs. She says that in two days she has rarely dispensed anything more serious than an antibiotic.

"Other places up the coast have fewer deaths and more injuries," she says. "That is to be expected -- some are killed and some are hurt. It is hard to understand what happened here. But in Kalmunai, either you lived or you died. There wasn't much in between."

One of the living whom Nagapooshani attended to yesterday is Ponnadura Rajeswari. She is 32, and when the tsunami struck, she was 8 months 3 weeks pregnant.

She was, like most of the survivors, near the town's main street when the biggest wave came. She was able to pick up her 3-year-old daughter, Nilex, grab Sujith, her 6-year-old son, by the hand, and hang on to them both. Her husband also survived.

Four days later she gave birth to a little boy. He, too, is just fine.

Their home was destroyed, though, and her father and uncle were killed, and the family has been so overwhelmed that they haven't had a chance to name the newborn.

Rajeswari's grieving mother -- that's her sitting on a nearby bench -- is a widow. Her family is homeless. Her husband, a day laborer, is jobless. They do not have a single rupee. They are all living on the floor of the Neelavanai Refugee Camp, which was a school until last week.

Some 1,300 others live here with them.

There is one toilet.

There is standing water in the courtyard and the smoke from cooking fires. Children have made a seesaw by balancing a 2-by-4 over a wooden chair and are bouncing up and down noisily.

She looks out at this and speaks softly.

"I do not know where we will go or what we will do," she says. "I keep wondering, 'Where is my house?' and I am now realizing we have no house. We have nothing."

She turns to holding her child, and then looks up at a sound that is rising, getting louder. The rain is returning, falling in sheets, falling in cascades from the sky, turning the long hours of the day in Kalmunai into night.

But in this way, one day and one hour and one morsel of food at a time, she says, she has found that it is possible to live.

She is, she says, lucky.