'The sea is coming'

Reprinted by permission,

The Gazette in Montgomery County, Md.

December 29, 2004

Many county residents are waiting anxiously for news of family and friends endangered by the tsunamis that devastated 11 countries in South Asia and East Africa on Sunday (December 26). Tens of thousands of men, women and children are dead, with the death toll rising every day. Untold millions of survivors face homelessness, starvation and disease.

Friends and family here pieced together what happened and what lies ahead. This is what they told The Gazette:

'Going to rebuild'

The phone rang at 6 a.m. Sunday in the North Potomac home of Diyana Sanders. It was her brother-in-law in London, telling of a catastrophic earthquake near Indonesia and sketchy reports of tsunamis ravaging the island nation of Sri Lanka. Her brother, Dayalan Sanders, runs an orphanage for 28 children in a province on the eastern coast of the island. The orphanage is surrounded by water, she said and she didn't think anyone could survive.

Diyana Sanders and her husband turned on the television, went online, searched for news, but were frustrated because coverage was confined to airports and capital cities. Then came another call from London from a cousin who had talked to her brother: He was OK. His wife was OK. All 35 children and the five staffers, OK. But the orphanage was ruined.

On Monday, Sanders talked to her brother for a very brief 15 minutes.

"His wife and the children are in a state of shock," she said. "He sounded dejected, but he said he is not giving up. He is going to rebuild."

Dayalan Sanders, 50, left Gaithersburg in 1997 to start the Refugee Relief Gospel Mission. Within it, the Samaritan Children's Home houses orphans displaced by a bloody 20-year war. He built the mission in a small village near Nabalady in the eastern province of Batticoloa, between a lagoon and the Indian Ocean.

It took only moments for the once idyllic setting to turn to chaos, he told his sister. One of the children ran up to his wife; "the sea is coming," the child said. She shepherded the children and the staffers onto a boat as the first wave hit, then went back to find Dayalan, who survived the initial rush of water by clinging to a tree. The water rose waist-high in seconds. The couple climbed aboard the boat as the second wave approached.

Dayalan read verses from the Bible as the 20-foot-high wall of water carried the fiberglass boat helplessly along. Finally, the wave crested and began to recede, dropping the boat and its passengers safely onto the lagoon.

While Diyana Sanders calls their survival "a story of miracles," she said the real trial is only beginning.

"These are people who ... have no place to go," she said. "They have to face it. They have to start rebuilding their lives."

Of the more than 1,000 families near the mission, only 25 appear to have survived intact, Dayalan told his sister. The receding waters dragged five feet of sand over roads, making it virtually impossible for rescue crews to reach the remote eastern provinces.

He told Diyana of dangers other than disease and homelessness that face the survivors: The tsunamis displaced land mines left over from the war. The Sri Lankan government has already reported several injuries to rescue workers.

"There are mines everywhere, which have shifted and nobody knows where," she said. "It is a disaster within a disaster."

Dayalan Sanders returned to the mission and told his sister what he found: The living quarters were gone. The main walls were listing; the rushing water uprooted chunks of the foundation.

Electrical generators, gone; computers, gone; the equipment, all gone.

Yet, somehow, the small chapel remained standing.