After the waves
Sunili is currently in Sri Lanka to research her honours project on women and development, and to visit her family. She’s written a brilliant post about what she’s encountered in a society devastated by the tsunami:
The first thing I feared when I heard about the tsunami while I was at a Boxing Day Pool party last year was the safety of my mother, who was there visiting my grandmother who lives right by the coast (all my family was safe). The next thing I realised was that the poorest of the poor living in those shacks by the beach would have been the worst hit. It was often the people who had nothing who lost everything.
We saw it all on the news in December and January, but nothing prepared me for what I saw driving down south this week. There must be many words I could use to describe it – carnage, devastation, destruction, annihilation, demolition, obliteration, ruin – but I feel they can not do justice to the vision before my eyes. How can you even start to describe what has happened to people’s lives here? And these are the ones that still have lives.
