Five years have passed and I still find it hard to talk about the tsunami. When the subject comes up my throat still constricts, choking back the horror and raw pain that I saw and more shockingly, the way the rest of the world seemed to carry-on with daily life. Relief came – sometimes too much of it, but nothing prepares a photographer for the shock of returning to normality from a disaster zone.
I was in Phuket the day before Christmas, dodging the bullet perhaps as my ground floor room would certainly have become my tomb. Back in Singapore the news broke and I flew to Sri Lanka, arriving at the center of the destruction 24 hours after the waves. My first stop was a hospital outside Galle. Hundreds of bodies lay on the damp concrete floor, children in fetal positions next to what rescuers assumed were their parents. Some of them had bandages and IV’s telling the story of the pathetic struggle to save them, others just looked like they were asleep, still in pajamas but slowly bloating.
Blood and bodily fluid and the stark stench of decomposition. I worked the scene like a vulture, the lenses my shield; my shock at the scene my helmet; technical adjustments on the cameras my distraction from the horror. I edited on the fly, transmitting a few images via satphone and moving onto more death. It is only that night as I look through my day’s take that the tears come, as the reality of what I saw hits me – there is no lens now. Only the hard truth in 2 megabyte files on a dusty laptop screen.
The destruction was complete – nothing within a few hundred yards of the beach was untouched. As we drove into Galle, a few miles out of town, life was normal. Schoolgirls walked to school, mothers hung laundry outside modest homes and markets were open. The sheer contrast from the normal Sri Lanka I love and the damage was instantaneous and merciless. We moved north, meeting a diving buddy who had lost his dive school and all his staff; some Swedish friends who had lost their hotel and thousands more bodies. The Sri Lankans were stoic, burying the dead methodically, guarding their emotions – numb with shock.
Further north we entered a community of Muslims that has been completely flattened. Muslims buried Hindus, Christians and Buddhists – praying for them, hoping their onward journey was complete wherever they go. A stern-faced army general arrived to assess the damage and the security situation. The bodies were extracted from huge piles of concrete by hand and the mass graves were in shallow beach sand. “They are all Muslims now” said one of the grave diggers.
