By Tony Cartledge
On a map, the small island nation of Sri Lanka looks like a giant teardrop. It's an appropriate image.
When a 9.0 earthquake off the faraway coast of Sumatra sent a tsunami speeding across the Indian Ocean on the morning after Christmas, the coastal residents of Sri Lanka were enjoying a beautiful, sunny Sunday. An hour later, an estimated 30,000 of them were dead and thousands of homes were destroyed.
A disaster-relief team from North Carolina Baptist Men arrived in the capital of Colombo Jan. 8 to work in cooperation with Hungarian Baptist Aid, which was already established in the country. Ferenc Tisch, director of international operations for the Hungarian group, encouraged the four-man assessment and logistics team to direct their attention to Galle, a village on the southwestern coast.
For 50 miles along the south and western coast, homes and businesses lie in total ruin, as if smashed by giant wrecking balls. The east coast of Sri Lanka took an even more direct hit from the tsunami and remains difficult to reach. Teams from Texas Baptist Men are working there.
Half of the business district in Galle (pronounced “gaul”) was wiped out by the tsunami, requiring the logistics team to purchase most of its equipment in Colombo.
Tisch told the team its primary contact in Galle would be a Swedish pastor named Christopher. As they approached the city, the North Carolinians spoke by mobile phone with Christopher, who told them to meet him near the entrance of the fort, a huge walled structure dating to Dutch occupation in the 17th century.
Arriving at the fort, the team expected to meet a tall, fair-haired Swede driving an official van. Instead, a small motorcycle sped up. Riding on the back was a relatively short and very dark man with a graying beard and a cherubic smile. Christopher's last name is Gammaddehewa. He is a Sri Lankan native who now lives in Sweden, where he works during the day as a staff nurse in a retirement home, and at night as a prison chaplain and pastor.
“When I heard about the tsunami, I had a great longing,” he said. Soon afterward, the Swedish Baptist Union asked if he would represent the organization in providing aid, and he was glad to comply.
Christopher is not the name Gammaddehewa was given when he was born in a village some 30 miles from Galle. His mother's family had a long heritage of producing Buddhist priests. For a while, Gammaddehewa planned to follow the same path, attending monastic school in the afternoons after public school ended.
But one day he found a Christian booklet lying by the wayside. He read it and wanted to learn more about Christianity. Knowing his mother would not approve of his attending church, he would go to a Presbyterian church on his way home from soccer matches. He did this for three years. “But I did not understand a word the pastor said,” Gammaddehewa said. “It was all over my head.”
One day, listening to a young pastor speak, it all suddenly made sense. “It was as if somebody had told him about me,” Gammaddehewa recalled. He made a profession of faith, which led to rejection by his family. He moved to Galle, where a Pentecostal pastor took him in and discipled him.
He met a missionary from Sweden, who helped him find a pen pal in her faraway country. A young Baptist woman wrote to him, and they became friends. She visited him in Sri Lanka. He visited her in Sweden. In time, they were married.
They lived in Sweden from 1979 to 1983, then moved to Sri Lanka. Gammaddehewa bought a house five miles inland from Galle, on the side of a steep hill covered with tropical trees. In time, Gammaddehewa started a church in a building adjacent to his home. When he returned to Sweden in 1990, the church called another pastor, and Gammaddehewa allowed him to live in the home.
For a few days in January, the tiny church sanctuary housed the four North Carolina volunteers, who slept on cots covered by mosquito nets.
The advance team expected to plan for water purification and mass meal preparation. In the Galle area, however, the team discovered that supplies of clean water are adequate and food is available, though not abundant. So plans were adjusted along the way.
For instance, visiting a refugee camp at Sudharmarama Wihare, a Buddhist temple in Galle, they found 100 children staying there, many orphaned by the tsunami. While the children had food, what they needed most were school supplies, officials said. The North Carolina team purchased and delivered school supplies, to the glee of 150 children.
By the second week after the tsunamis, most refugee camps were emptying, as the government announced plans for schools to reopen. Homeless families moved in with relatives or found other ways to return closer to their home areas, even though many of their houses were gone.
Those returning to the stricken villages found water sources available. But many open wells, used for washing and bathing, were choked with debris. And although most households have tap water, many residents won't drink it for fear a dead body might have been in the water.
The logistics team purchased two water pumps and assisted villagers in cleaning the wells and pumping out the seawater, then applying chlorine to shock the water and make it useful again. Some of the wells are 10 or more feet in diameter, requiring extensive effort.
The team focused much of its effort in Dodanduwa (duh-DON-dua), a fishing village several miles north of Galle. The village of 15,000 persons suffered massive damage, with many homes completely leveled and hundreds of others severely damaged.
Pumping all the murky water from one 10-by-12-foot open well proved a daunting task. Surrounded by curious onlookers, the team cut hoses and attached fittings to a water pump. After some difficulty priming the pump, a firm stream of dirty water began to spew into a narrow rain gutter.
The hose was not quite up to the task, however. Giving in to the pump's powerful suction, the walls of the flexible hose began to collapse. The pump would lose its prime, and the team would have to start over. After several starts and restarts, two members of the team, J. E. Skinner and Larry Osborne, were dispatched to fetch another pump from the hardware store in Gonapinuala.
They returned with a larger pump and a bigger hose. Soon two pumps were working hard-and two hoses were collapsing on themselves.
As the pumping continued slowly, someone suggested the villagers could help by using buckets to bail the water. But they insisted they had no buckets. Gammaddehewa, the native guide and translator, ultimately understood that they did not want to touch the water for fear that a dead body might still be in the well.
Gammaddehawa then removed his vest, shirt and shoes and climbed into the well to show the water wasn't harmful. Buckets appeared as if by magic, and soon a line of excited villagers were taking turns filling them to the brim and splashing them toward the gutter.
Soon older boys also descended into the well to scrub the walls, quartering half of a coconut husk and using the stiff fibrous end as a brush. The bottom of the well was covered with a dark layer of muck, probably formed from years of decayed leaves and other organic matter.
As Skinner and Osborne manned the pumps with help from a boy named Dadanga, team leaders distributed and demonstrated portable water-purification units donated by Woman's Missionary Union. They knew they didn't have enough for all households, but they also knew that the village consisted mainly of extended families. They learned that 12 families lived in the area. In fact, that part of the village was known as Gewaldolahe Linda, “The Twelve-House Well.”
To confront the villagers' fear of contaminated water, the relief team drank the first cup of filtered water. They gathered a representative from each of the 12 families and three visiting families and, as Gammaddehewa translated, demonstrated how to assemble, use and care for the small purifiers, which pump water through a ceramic filter.
When the pump was assembled, they dipped the intake hose into a bucket of tap water and pumped water through the filter and into a cup held by a small boy, who immediately turned it up and drank-then grinned and asked for more.
The next cup was passed around for everyone's inspection. Then each family was given a pump kit and a spare filter.
The next morning, returning to the 10-by-12 open well they had emptied of debris and seawater, the team found the water level had returned almost to its former level-but was still discolored. They added two bottles of bleach to shock the water and make it useable, then turned their attention to other dirty wells in the area.
The advance team began its trip home Jan. 13. Current plans call for a 10-person North Carolina team to follow, then a six-person team. Assessments of future needs and projects will follow.
Associated Baptist Press
Tony Cartledge is editor of North Carolina Baptists' Biblical Recorder.