I mentioned in Chapter Three that Dr. Gaithrie Fernando, a Sri Lankan psychology professor teaching in UCLA, is one of the growing number of researchers who believe that the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) measurements used in the West to assess the mental health of trauma victims do not yield a measurable understanding of trauma victims in cooperative or collectivist societies. [1] The reason is, PTSD measurements have been developed for the western individualistic cultural model, when, as she argues, “A definition of psychosocial functioning that takes social domains into account is particularly salient in collectivistic cultures (like Sinhala and Tamil cultures in Sri Lanka,) where behavior and experience are more dependent upon social networks, religious beliefs, cultural practices, and social roles.” [2]
This does not mean that Sri Lankans (and others in collectivist cultures) do not experience PTSD symptoms such as an inability to relax, recurring nightmares, intrusive memories or “reliving” of the event, being easily startled, numbness, hyper vigilance, the disruption of senses of reasonable mastery, and detachment from others. [3] Fernando says some PTSD symptoms appear to be universal, but that these symptoms alone do not fully capture the trauma experienced by people whose psychological wellbeing is dependent on a much wider set of functions and experiences as defined above. Therefore she developed a culturally grounded measure to capture more fully how rural Sinhala Buddhist individuals of the lower level economic strata experience and express trauma, a measure that generally illustrates how, in both Sinhala and Tamil cultures, mental health is conceptualized differently from the West.
Two questions I set out to investigate in this study were to see if tsunami victims’ social statuses and economic conditions impacted their abilities to recover psychologically from the tragedy, and what role Buddhism plays in their recovery process. I provided some answers in Chapter Three. Here I explore the emotional well-being of several survivors a year after the disaster. They include narrators whose voices were heard in previous chapters as well as a doctor who lost twelve family members, and who I met only when I returned for follow-up research. I analyze the data drawing primarily on Fernando’s work; but also use the Western PTSD diagnostic framework when applicable.
It should be noted that Fernando developed her model based on rural Sinhala people of the lower economic class. But it applies to urban middle class tsunami victims as well because as mentioned before, all Sri Lankan Buddhists belong to the Theravada Buddhist School, so share a common worldview. However, the ways in which people apply the philosophy is particular to each individual, depending on their particular needs and levels of understanding and comprehension. I begin the analysis with the voices of Suneetha and Amal, the couple who lost their home and furniture business.
***
As we heard in Chapter Four, soon after the tsunami, Amal and Suneetha coped with their losses reflecting on the Buddhist concept of ‘anitya’ or impermanence. A year later, their lens had not changed, but their vision had widened for Suneetha told me, “These days we remind ourselves and each other about the Buddha’s teachings of the Ata Lo Dahama, [4] meaning the eight vicissitudes the Buddha said revolves around each and every one of us, wherever and whenever we may live. These are: gains and losses, good repute and ill repute, praise and censure, and pleasure and pain.
As Maha Thera Piyadassi, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost scholar monks reminds us, if we can understand the nature of human life and its ups and downs, if we see how things come into being and pass away in their proper perspective, we can face the vicissitudes of life calmly. [5] Dr. Harishchandra also told me that the way in which individuals perceive and interpret life changing events play a significant role in how they respond to traumatic events. So, this couple found it helpful to reflect on the fact that gains and losses are a part of life. But as the Buddha also said, nothing, including our mental states, is permanent and Suneetha went on, “I am not saying it is easy to maintain this outlook because our minds play tricks. Suddenly our (previous) home appears in my mind and it is so real that I feel as if I am actually physically walking around there, doing the things I used to do….And when that happens it is unbearable, I cannot stop the tears.” Such moments of ‘re-living’ are symptomatic of PTSD. So is ‘hyper-vigilance’: she said both she and Amal are “always watching the sea when we go somewhere. We never did that before.”
Suneetha also described other PTSD symptoms of impaired concentration and decreased self-efficacy, and spoke about experiencing numbness on the left side of her head. However, as Dr. Fernando notes, interpersonal networks and connections carry greater weight in expressions of psychological illness and wellness in Sri Lanka, and what seemed to worry Suneetha more than her physical wellbeing was that those symptoms were affecting her ability to care for her toddler (i.e. being a good mother) as well as her job performance (i.e. being a good employee.) “I really have to think about each and everything I do now, and I never did that before” she said, with a troubled look.
Amal appeared depressed due to his inability to provide for the needs of his growing family (i.e. being a good husband/father/ provider.) Employed in low-level government jobs, upward mobility was impossible without their business-generated income, but he did not have the financial resources to relocate his furniture business on their property by the side of the main road, the ideal location to attract customers. Both the wife and husband also deeply mourned their descent into the lower class and the stressful situation had taken a toll on Amal’s health also. He was now taking medication for elevated blood pressure – a post-tsunami development.
Still, their philosophical attitudes and attempts to view their predicament as part and parcel of the human experience had enabled them to cope with their traumatic experience without a negative impact on interpersonal relations. For instance, fighting with relatives and neighbors is indicative of poor psychosocial functioning says Fernando. I visited this couple at their home several times and met one or both at the temple on various occasions, and did not see or hear of such conflicts within their own relationship or with other relatives and neighbors. On the contrary, their social networks were very much intact. While Suneetha was at work, her mother-in-law watched their son, now a cheerful toddler, and the relations between the two women were warm. Suneetha also had friendly interactions with neighbors and was actively involved in temple activities. Nor did I see or hear evidence of tensions between their relations as husband and wife. Their story has a happy ending. With help from a number of people (including myself) and private loans, Amal built a small new shop on his beachfront property and when I visited him there in 2007, he said business was good.
***
When I returned for follow-up research I brought pirikara (donations) to give the monks attending the first year dana for tsunami victims and went to deliver them to the parents of the two young girls who died, and to Sisira, who lost his wife, all four children, and father-in-law. All three survivors had refused to speak to me during my first research trip, but they all accepted the pirikara gladly and invited me to the dana. I had to decline the invitation to the dana for the two little girls though because their mother had had a new born son, and they had postponed the dana to a later date, which would have been the eighth birthday of their older daughter. I was scheduled to return to the U.S. before that. But when I visited her, Harshi, the 25-year-old mother, talked to me about her tsunami experience.
When she heard people shouting and saw a big wave, Harshi had fled with her two daughters, seven-year-old Kavindya Gayathri and three-year-old Shakya Devindi and the woman who helped her around the house. The two adults had taken hold of the children, but the sea over powered them. Harshi lost consciousness and when she came to, her daughter was gone and she was lodged among the branches of a young coconut tree. Two men rescued her and she reunited with her husband, brother, and the household help. But both her daughters were missing. It was not until the next morning that the two girls were found. “I was able to hold my older daughter and embrace her, but they wouldn’t even let me to see my younger daughter. She had been found under the rail road,” Harshi wept.
With their home and her husband’s successful cottage industry – a timber mill – completely destroyed, Harshi and her husband were now living with his parents. We talked in their bedroom where Harshi’s newborn son, just six days old, lay fast asleep. Looking at him tenderly, she stroked his head of black hair. But this idyllic scene lasted only a moment; the tragedy intruded on every treasured moment in this young mother’s life. “Whenever I look at my son, I am reminded of my older daughter….He looks just like she did at birth,” she sighed. “I know I have to bear this somehow, but I always think how much better it would have been if I still had my two daughters also!” Her son whimpered and she picked him up. Her tears dripped down to the baby’s arm. Her words, “I know I have to bear this somehow” were indicative of “heaviness in the chest” that Fernando identifies as a sign of distress in trauma survivors she interacted with.
Trying to think of a way to pacify Harshi I said gently, “Well, you have another baby now and you are still young. You can have another child or two”. But she looked at me with enormous pain in her eyes. “I can never forget my daughters, can I?” she asked me in a broken voice. “A mother can never forget her children,” she said again, this time more to herself. I felt terrible. I had hurt her deeply, even if unintentionally.
After some hesitation, I asked Harshi about the upcoming dana. She said they would have it at the site where their home had stood. “There is nothing there, but we want to put up a tent and offer the dana. That is what most people who lost their homes did,” she said. Our conversation shifted to life and death, and I asked how she tries to come to terms with what happened. “The only way to come to terms with what happened is to realize that whatever karma they did is also (tied to) our karma,” she replied. As explained before, according to the Buddhist theory of samsara, people commit karmic actions individually or collectively. But collective karmic actions do not yield similar results for everyone involved because each individual’s intentions are different, which means that consequences would differ accordingly. The karmic theory prevented Harshi from blaming herself for not being able to save her daughters.
After we had talked at length Harshi she told me that she usually avoids people who want to talk about her tsunami experience because it is too painful. I was taken aback by this admission for she had not hesitated when I asked for an interview. But now I realized I had not only invaded her privacy, but had also subjected her to the deepest pain. It was too late to undo the damage, so I suggested the only remedy I could think of. I offered to leave out her story from this book; although I did not want to do it. But she replied, “It is alright to include my story in your book because this did not happen to me only. This happened to so many of us.” And she gave me a photograph of her daughters with a request to include it in the book. I am deeply honored to include their photograph and all the others given to me by the loved ones of those who died in the tsunami.
***
The dana for Sisira’s loved ones was held at his parents’ home, located deep inside the village, where he now lives. Sisira held up well throughout the ceremony, so when I took my leave from him I asked if he would speak with me at a later date. He agreed. But as soon as we started to talk, it was plain that he was still in too much pain to recount his experiences and I offered to leave. But he insisted, “No, no, madam, I will tell you what happened.” Then, screwing up his face a couple of times to fight back tears, he said hoarsely, “That morning I went to Ampitiya to do some work. About an hour later, the waves hit and took my four little ones, my wife, and her father.” His voice stalled. Then he looked at me pleadingly. “There’s nothing more to say,” he said and sat motionless, tears flowing down his face.
Sisira’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law who were also present gave me glimpses into his life before the disaster. Sisira worked in a timber mill and also supplied fresh produce for his uncle’s stall in the Galle Market to earn extra money to provide for his family. He doted on his four children said his mother, and accompanied the older ones each morning to school. “Now he cannot bear to see children walking to school in the morning! But what can we do? This is the karma they brought with them, and they went leaving us to suffer” his mother sighed deeply.
Since the tragedy, Sisira had not returned to the timber mill. “He spends the mornings with his friends drinking arrack on the beach, [6] and then comes back and just sleeps,” his mother said. ‘Not performing duties, poor self-care, and sleeping’ were themes that emerged in Fernando’s samples of psychosocial impairment. I asked Sisira why he did not return to his regular job. He said he lost his chain saw to the tsunami, and that he doesn’t have the physical or mental will to return to the timber mill. Fatigue, vocational impairment, alienation, and social withdrawal are symptomatic of traumatic stress both in Fernando’s analysis and in PTSD.
It was easy to understand why life had lost its meaning for this grieving husband and father; but how could the path he had taken make it any better? So, I said, “Sisira, you say you can’t go back to work because you don’t have the physical and mental will. Isn’t arrack going to deteriorate your body and mind even more?” He looked at me wearily. “I drink because that helps me to sleep,” he replied. “That is the only way my mind can get some rest.”
Experts know that attempts to blur the pain with alcohol or drugs is one of the strategies trauma victims employ, but his reply really aggravated his mother. “When he is awake, all he does is to sit in a corner and cry or stare into space,” she said angrily. Being ‘lost in thought’ is consistent with Fernando’s findings of psychosocial distress. His mother continued. “Then I scold him and tell him to go out because if he goes on like that, he will go crazy, won’t he?” Tears were streaming down her cheeks too, whether from anger, desperation, or grief, I did not know. All I knew was that a vicious cycle had emerged in this home: The more depressed Sisira became, the more irritable and angry his mother got. And the angrier she got, the more he drank. Fighting with relatives and neighbors – people’s normal network of support in a cooperative society – is another symptom of psychosocial distress, according to Fernando. How could the stressful, conflict ridden situation in this traumatized family, be resolved? Every member of this household was a trauma victim and needed the support of the others. How could their lives ever get better if Sisira continued to turn to the bottle for solace?
I thought for a moment, and gently pointed out again to Sisira that if he didn’t stop drinking he would only grow mentally and physically weaker, and that the weaker he became the harder it would be to rebuild his life. He sat quietly, looking at his hands for a moment and then burst out angrily with a reply that really shocked me.
“I didn’t drink like this before (the tsunami) but now I drink and smoke because I have not got any help from the government yet. Everyone is getting fifty thousand and hundred thousand rupees to rebuild their damaged homes or they are getting new houses. But I am yet to get anything!”
I was completely taken aback both by his explanation and the vehemence in his voice. Here was all the evidence that his and his extended family’s socioeconomic situation severely impacted his psychosocial status. I asked if he did not get any aid from the government. “I got the funeral expenses of 15,000 rupees per person who died, and four installments of 2,500 rupees. But I lost everybody and everything that I ever owned, and nobody has yet done anything for me. That is why I drink. I drink with my buddies because they treat me well.” His buddies were fishermen and besides arrack, they always gave him a fish or two from the catch.
All this time, I thought Sisira drank because he was tormented by the memories of his wife and children and other losses. But now he said he drank because he was angry at the world at large. The tsunami destroyed his personal world, but neither the wider community nor the government cared. Nobody helped him with the seemingly endless struggles that had become his lot in life. Feeling utterly helpless, he took out his frustrations and anger on his family.
Psychologists identify several dependent factors of traumatic stress levels - the degree of exposure to the traumatic event, previous exposure to similar events, personality traits, age, and health conditions. Sisira appeared to be in his mid-thirties, and if he had not talked about mental and physical exhaustion, I would have perceived him to be in good physical health. He was not exposed directly to the tsunami; technically he had had only tertiary exposure, meaning he had close ties with primary victims, but his world had revolved around them. Now, suddenly and cruelly bereft of those he had loved and everything that gave meaning to life, and abandoned by those in power who could help him, he had fallen into such deep depression that he had lost all interest and motivation to live a productive life. His reluctance to keep awake because that meant such torment, drove him to the bottle. His drinking alienated him from his mother and other members of his natal family, who, before the tsunami, had taken care of his children when Sisira and his wife went to work. His mother, aunt, and other close kin were themselves trying to adjust to the pain and emptiness of the changed circumstances and simply did not have the knowledge, skills, or the emotional strength to deal with his behavior. He rebelled by turning to the bottle.
Because ethnographers work within the communities, we naturally become entwined in the lives and events of those we study, and we have an obligation to engage in activist anthropology. I asked Sisira, “What sort of help are you looking for? Would it help you to get a chain saw?” But my question unexpectedly triggered more pain for him. “I didn’t lose just a chain saw,” he told me tearfully. “My wife worked in the garment factory. We had goods worth about Rs. 100,000 we bought jointly….I don’t think I have the physical prowess to return to the lumber mill now”.
I was at a loss for a moment. But I persisted, not wanting to let go of this opportunity which offered a chance to steer his mind in a more constructive direction – if I handled it properly. “Well, what do you think you can do to earn a living?” I asked.
“I’d like to open a small grocery store,” he replied without any hesitation, as if this had been a life-long ambition. “I am not talking of a shop on a grand scale, just a nice small one” he assured me. His response suggested he had not lost his motivation to work and that he was not seeking to avoid the larger society. But it turned out he had neither prior experience running a business, nor any idea of how much capital would be required for such a venture. All he knew was that he wanted to open a small grocery store right there on his parents’ tiny front yard.
The problem really confounded me. I was leaving the country in a few days, and had no money left to help him. But how could I leave this man, one of the most helpless tsunami victims, now even more vulnerable because he was in danger of losing the support of his natal family too due to his alcoholism, without offering some concrete help? I thought quickly. I had developed close working relations with people who could help, such as the Divisional Secretary of Habaraduwa and the Chairperson of the DRMU. I promised Sisira that I would speak to these officials and see that he realizes his dream to open a grocery store. I was immediately rewarded. His eyes became a little brighter, and his face, which always looked so strained, softened a bit.
This transformation gave me another opening for something else. “I will definitely speak to the officials about you, but to get help, you have to promise that you will stop drinking.” I told Sisira. To this he replied he doesn’t drink that much. I knew enough about alcoholism to realize that he was in a typical stage of denial and that unless he accepted that he had the problem, nothing I said was going to make any difference. So, I tried a new tactic. “How can you do meritorious actions for your wife and children if you drink? Your mind will only get dull and inactive, won’t it?” I asked Sisira.
He looked at me hard. “Madam, I could have got a bottle of poison and taken my life when this happened, but then who would do the merit making for them? That is what I live for now and I have already done a lot of meritorious deeds on behalf of my wife and children.” He said he had owned a piece of land in Meepe (a village further inland) on which had stood a small house. He had not moved his family there because it was too far from the children’s school. Following the tragedy, he had buried his loved ones on that land and then, as a meritorious act for them, he told a poor family to use the lumber from the house to renovate their terribly dilapidated home, and then donated the land to the people of Meepe because they did not have public cemetery.
I was deeply touched by his story and felt close to tears as I thought how hard it must have been for him. Sisira went on. “I also used the money I got from the government and whatever money there was in the children’s savings books to construct a mal asana (a platform to offer flowers in the temple) for a new temple that is being built in a village about six miles from here. I am told it is the best in this area. I did that for merit for my wife and children. If you want, I can take you there” With his mother’s consent, Sisira, his young nephew, and I went to the temple. He introduced me to the monk there as the lady who brought the pirikara from America.
There is no doubt Sisira found enormous solace and comfort from Buddhist teachings and practices. Performing them also showed that he was not in denial; he accepted the deaths of his loved ones. His desire to open a grocery store demonstrated he was ready to move on, but his family did not have the economic means to help him.
The next morning I met the DS. He of course knew Sisira’s story; the deaths occurred in the Habaraduwa Division. But he did not know that the tragedy had plunged Sisira to the depths of despair. He listened carefully to the narrative and said he was expecting a German philanthropic friend soon, who built five houses for tsunami victims. “I am sure he will help Sisira to open a grocery store when he hears the story,” Samarasekera said. He also asked that Sisira meets him the following Monday. I went home and wrote a letter to the official summarizing our discussion, in Sinhala. Then I took it to Sisira and told him to read it. He promised to meet the official on Monday.
A few weeks after I returned to California, I telephoned the DS. He said that Sisira met him as scheduled and that he submitted a cost estimate for the proposed business as well. However, when the philanthropist arrived, Sisira disappeared. Samarasekara sent the GN in search of him, and his distraught mother said her son had gone away and they did not know where to look for him. So, said Samarasekara, “My friend left and there was nothing I could do to help Sisira.” I could not believe it. “Well, we both did our best. I hope things will get better for him someday,” I said, trying to contain the disappointment and anger at Sisra, however unreasonable that may have been.
But Sisra’s story too has a happy ending. After the buffer zone law was rescinded, many people who had asked for replacement homes returned to where they used to live, leaving an excess of new homes built by donors. Samarasekera had given one of these to Sisira and when I returned to my research site for two weeks in 2007, I went to meet him. But a neighbor said Sisira had gone to Colombo to obtain a passport, to go to the Middle East for work. Though I was sorry to have missed him, this was wonderful news; he was no longer angry and depressed, but looking forward to a new life.
***
In 2006, I also went to the home of Nihal and Latha, with the couple’s niece, Sreenika. The parents had offered a reward of two million rupees and immunity from legal proceedings for the safe return of their daughter, and with the police, the CID, and the Child Protective Services, followed up various leads they received in response to newspaper appeals, but without success. The police had also traced the fisherman who took the girl in the boat, but the man no longer knew where she was.
“Had our daughter died, we would accept it and fulfill our obligations according to the Buddha’s dhamma, however difficult that would be. But when something like this happens how can we bear it? We searched for her so hard!” Nihal began crying. Latha sat beside her husband, without uttering a word. Tears streamed down her face too.
The family lives far from the sea in a Colombo suburb and so they did not lose material wealth. Nihal was still securely employed. But like Sisira, this couple too was tormented by the most mundane of daily activities. Only their older daughter, Naduni, goes to school with Nihal in the morning. Latha has none to pick up at noon and take for extracurricular activities as she used to. She is a housewife, and time moved desperately slowly. “She must feel like a prisoner confined to the home. So, I tell her to at least go to the temple until Naduni and I get back. The temple is the only place that gives us some consolation now,” Nihal said.
Nihal and Latha had also worried about the impact of the situation on Naduni because she was scheduled to sit a competitive public examination in 2005. But she passed it creditably. “That gives us strength because it shows she has not fallen like us” said Nihal. But what he said next showed the depths to which he and his wife have fallen were impacting interpersonal relations in the family. “We don’t even utter 25 words between us at home anymore. Someone may be sleeping somewhere. My wife may be cooking. We just don’t laugh and talk as we used to.” Sleeping and avoidance are typical signs of psychosocial distress. Contrast this with Nihal’s recollections of December 24, 2004. “We went shopping all day with the children. We bought new books and book bags for them and came home about 7.30 in the evening. I was so happy that day I even danced with my little girl….” My heart ached for this family. Talking about that night again he said, “That was the last night we experienced happiness. We can never feel the happiness we felt that night again unless we find her….”
He also said both of them suffer from insomnia, a PTSD symptom. “It is impossible to get a restful night of sleep. Even if we go to bed at 12 midnight feeling exhausted, we may sleep for an hour or two, but then we wake up and after that there is no way we can get back to sleep” Nihal said. Fernando theorizes that Sri Lankans tend to somatize their psychological stress. Nihal said, “We have cried before and tears had flown out of our eyes. But now when we cry our eyes and the surrounding area burn; a burning heat comes with the tears”.
Nihal said repeatedly he did not know how to adapt to the changed situation. Knowing their daughter was alive, he could not close the door to the past and move on to the future. Trapped in a liminal phase, there seemed to be no hope of regaining the orderly and predictable life he had known, or looking towards what we generally take for granted as a normal future. To make matters worse, like Suneetha, Nihal was experiencing intrusive and recurring visions of his little girl. “Sometimes, even when I am in the office, I see my daughter’s face – not just one but a thousand – all around me. When that happens it is impossible to erase that vision and I automatically fall down emotionally,” he confessed. Volkan and Zintl call such episodes ‘splitting of the mind.’ They explain this happens when attachments roam through trauma victims’ minds unconsciously because they cannot do the emotional work necessary to let lost persons go, or in Suneetha’s case, lost possessions go. [7] But with each re-living or intrusion, Nihal, like Suneetha, becomes more demoralized.
Although the tsunami haunts them continually, Latha said the event “has become a thing of the past for most of the public.” She said some people had even begun to negate the tragedy to such an extent they saw the couple’s Herculean efforts to find their daughter not as a logical and the only legitimate response to their situation, but more as a distortion of reality. “They don’t understand why we cannot just accept what happened because so many children were lost. When some people see the word ‘tsunami’ in the newspaper, they just turn the page over. It is only for us this ordeal continues” she said. Consequently, Nihal was now leaving out the word ‘tsunami’ from newspaper appeals for their lost daughter, so people will pay more attention.
In the privacy of their homes, however, not only Nihal and Latha, but also Siritunga, who rescued Hiruni after the tsunami receded, continued their search with the firm belief that she will one day come back home. “Siritunga says that the most meritorious act he could do for his wife (who also died in the tsunami) is to find Hiruni. So, whenever he ever gets any leads about her he follows them up. He is certain she is alive.” Nihal said.
Their conviction that Hiruni is alive and will be found has been strengthened by several fortune tellers. In Sri Lanka, like in other Buddhist countries, Buddhism co-exists in harmony with other religious traditions and folk traditions because the Buddha advocated tolerance for all religions and belief systems. So, even though the Buddha did not encourage fortune telling and other clairvoyant practices, and Nihal and Latha had not habitually gone to fortune tellers before the tsunami, the couple had visited several such people since. “Some of them tell us exactly what happened as if they are watching a movie!” Nihal said. He said one man handed him a piece of string and told him to cut through the pages of an old Ola Leaf book. Then, searching Nihal’s face intently but without asking any questions, he wrote something on a piece of paper. “Is this your story?” he asked, handing the paper to Nihal. “You are searching for a young child. She is alive and well” he had written. Then he told Nihal to open the Ola Leaf book at the page he marked with the string. The child is living and is in good health” it said. Not one of the fortune tellers said their daughter died. “Some even predicted a time period within which she will come back. Some of those dates are passed, but some are yet to come, so we live in hope,” Nihal said.
The fact that the family could hope for a reunion with Hiruni of course made their situation vastly different from Sisira’s. Besides actively searching for Hiruni, they had also made significant behavioral changes to help their situation. For instance, the family stopped eating fish and meat, and Nihal, a social drinker, had become a teetotaler. “We live a very kusalakari jeevitayak (meritorious life) now and we believe that our kusal (merits) will help in our efforts to find our daughter” he said.
Hiruni’s belongings remain just as she left them. In the bathroom, her toothbrush still stands in its holder. On a shelf in another room stand her books, two boxes of toys, and the new book bag they had purchased. Latha opened the bag and showed me the books that the little girl had packed herself, ready to go to school after the holidays. Picking up a bright red remote control car that they had given her for her seventh birthday, her mother said, “This is the type of thing she liked. She loved swimming, gymnastics, and things like that.” Nihal pulled a box from under a bed, in which were more toy belonging to Hiruni - cars and a bus, two soccer balls, a tambourine, and many other toys. Balancing a ball on his fingers, Nihal said, “She did not like to study, so during exam. time I bring her a toy every day for about five weeks, to encourage her to do well.” He was smiling for the first time that evening as he remembered those days. His smile reminded me of what Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru wrote while in prison: “Unaffected by the storms and upheavals of the present, it (the past) maintains its dignity and repose and tempts the troubled spirit and the tortured mind to seek shelter in its vaulted catacombs. There is peace there and security, and one may even sense a spiritual quality.” [8]
But unlike for Pandit Nehru, who was writing in prison and thus found “The present hardly exists, for there is an absence of feeling and sensation which might separate if from the dead past,” Nihal’s memories were intricately bound with his tortuous present, and he could not find peace in that treasured past for long. The upheavals that dragged him back to the present so unmercifully broke his heart. “My little girl was very close to me. Even when Naduni did not want to go somewhere with me, she always came. She loved to sleep next to me. On our last night together too she fell asleep next to me and I carried her back and put her in her bed. Then he said almost to himself, “I am a good swimmer and I have saved three lives. Why, oh why, when I have saved others did I lose my own daughter?” He shook his head, unable to comprehend. Then again he lapsed into the past. “If only the train had gone forward two more minutes it would have reached the Hikkaduwa station and none of this would have happened. That station was intact….” That afternoon Nihal also showed me an exercise book. In it Hiruni had drawn a picture of him and written underneath,
“Mage Thatha. Mage Thatha ge name Nihal. Thatha mata chocolate genath denawa. Thathata mama adarey”.
(My daddy. My daddy’s name is Nihal. Daddy brings me chocolate. I love Daddy).
Nihal had made many vows to the gods asking for help and said that every night, he prays to a particular god, shows him this page, and pleads for help.
Latha had not said much in the three hours I spent at their home. I asked if she wanted to say anything. After a long pause, she said, “The only thing to talk about is the loneliness and the loss.” Then she was lost in thought again. Nihal spoke for her. “I am now 48 years old, my wife is 45,” he said. “Although we do not realize it, when you have a young child at home, we are also like children. It is when you lose a child that you realize you have been also reliving your childhood with them. Now we realize that as we played with her, we too enjoyed life in an innocent, child like way. We have lost that now. Until you lose a child you do not realize what a fun-loving person you had been….Sometimes even when I am just walking on the street I discreetly put my hands together on my chest and worship, thinking of her. But when I am alone I just scream. I have to do that, there is no other way to bear this pain.....I pray that not even an insect ever experiences a tragedy like this, because it is impossible to bear. Now I feel it would have been better had I died.”
Although Naduni and Sreenika were present in the room throughout, they did not speak at all. I asked how the tragedy affects them. Naduni said that she dreams of her little sister about once a month. “I never see her in the tsunami, only that we are playing or coming home from school and things like that. Then I wake up feeling terribly sad.”
Sreenika said, “I used to have nightmares and wake up really frightened, but they didn’t keep me awake.” Bad dreams was a theme that appeared in Fernando’s findings. Like Latha and Nihal, Sreenika also talked of intrusive memories. “Over the year, the horror of all that happened has diminished, but there are moments when a vision of the tsunami suddenly appears in front of my eyes when I am awake.” She said such problems are getting less and that going to work helps, but that she is now unable to watch ghost stories on the television and hear tales about spirits. “I feel so afraid. That is something that I had never experienced before” she said. Fernando says traumatized females mention a fear of ghosts more often than males.
Like other narrators, both Sreenika and Naduni came to terms with Hiruni’s loss with their understanding of the karmic theory. “All nine of us (who went on the trip) must have committed some terrible karma together to experience this,” Sreenika said. “Yes, and that is why we lost nangi (younger sister),” Naduni agreed.
I asked this family if talking about the tragedy made things worse or better for them. Latha said it heightens the pain and makes her want to cry. But Nihal said it is helpful because he can then cry and expel the tightness and anguish inside. Naduni said the same. With so much pain and suffering in their lives, I did not want to worsen their situation by including their story in this book if they had any second thoughts – although it is such a valuable a contribution to this study. So I asked several times if it was alright to mention their experience and their real names. Every time Nihal gave me permission. “Now I am running out of options and places to look, so if this can be publicized in other ways that would be a tremendous help for us,” he said.
Hiruni disappeared when she was seven years old. In 2010, to help with their searching, I offered to have Hiruni’s picture progressed to her current age through Forensic Compositing, and the family accepted gladly. Latha asked that the progression depicts her daughter at 14-15 years of age. I contacted Phoejoe, a company in Michigan, and requested them to do two images, one with long hair and the other with short hair. They did such a good job that Nihal said that relatives who were shown the progressed picture believed Hiruni had been found. The family published the updated photos with appeals, but she still remains missing.
***
When I met Ciranthi a year after the tsunami she was supervising workmen remodeling her home. “The project was a direct result of the tsunami – it made me very aware anitya,” she said. “I reflect on that constantly and feel like I am running out of time. Now I have begun to do things I always planned to do. One was to settle the children in Australia for higher education (which she had done.) Another was to remodel this house. I inherited it from my parents and want to leave it for my children. They are very good people and once this remodeling is done I would feel I have made my contribution to them because they have a better place to return to.” She went on, “Coming face to face with death changes you to the core. It changes your personality, your attitude towards everything. It gives you a lot to think about.”
Besides driving her to stop procrastinating, she said that her tsunami experience also steered her towards Buddhism. She was familiar with Buddhist teachings before the tragedy, but had not been inclined to serious contemplation of the teachings. A typical product of a Westernized urban middle class family, Ciranthi’s life has been shaped more by the modern capitalist western culture that pervades the city than Buddhist cultural traditions, but now, she reads Buddhist philosophy and “Very much live on the words of the Buddha. His teachings give you a balanced perspective. He has given answers to the way this world works and the entire business of living. It’s very real to me now that you can be here, and gone the next minute, so why chase after things which are like a mirage? My attitude now is to take each day as it comes. I don’t make plans for the next 10 years; I don’t believe in that any more. Some people say this is not a good attitude, but I know from experience that you may have to leave everything with no planning and no warning. So I don’t make long term plans that can simply go down the drains.”
“How did you view life before all this happened?” I asked.
Smiling, she recalled she wanted prestige, to become ‘somebody’ socially and professionally. She also wanted to enjoy herself and to be able to afford whatever she wanted, so she worked hard and saved as much as she could. “I wouldn’t say I was greedy for money, but it seems to me money rules your entire life. We know that in any society people formulate ideas about how things are or should be done. These are cultural conceptions. You think this is the way to grow up, that you must get the best job, get married, have children. There’s a set pattern, set boundaries, within which you act as a member of a group. They influence individual goals about what we want to achieve, where we are going, and so on. But now I realize I wanted money for the wrong reasons, like wanting to buy a better car when the one I had was perfectly fine. Now, the furthest thing in my mind is how far I can go in my career. I socialize because I work, but now I don’t enjoy that; I find it frivolous. I am not reaching out to indulge myself any more. If I have a comfortable life I will be happy. That is a big change in how I look at things.”
“In my quiet moments I reflect a lot on what happened, but not in a bitter way or a sad way. I am positive because there is a lot to live for. You must make something of your life, but that does not mean acquiring material things. Living in this consumer society, it is very difficult to find people who are not interested in material things. We get caught up in all the publicity and propaganda and advertising. It is pretty normal, but in actual fact they mean nothing. People should take the time to stop and think about what they are doing. Then they will realize that there is more to life than just eating and drinking and partying” she said.
“Somebody who hears you talk, and who is not familiar with Buddhism, might say you feel like this because you are depressed,” I remarked.
“Not at all!” she disagreed, smiling broadly. “Depression can ruin you. I never went to that place called ‘Depression.’ I think you fall into that situation if you don’t have the capacity to understand that things like tsunami happen due to various natural conditions and to accept them. As the Buddha taught, that’s the way things are. You have to understand that these things are,” she emphasized again. She was referring to the Niyama Dharma (See Chapter 4.) “So, I am not going to ask why the tsunami happened, or why it happened to me and not someone else, or why it happened to Sri Lanka. I don’t have to clutter my brain with things I don’t need to know.”
She had indeed discovered Buddhism. The Buddha said “One is one’s own refuge.” He said each woman or man has the power within themselves to find liberation from all dukkha (unsatisfactoriness that results from impermanence) through their own personal effort and intelligence. Without worrying about the causes for the catastrophe which was beyond her control, Ciranthi was focusing on what she can control – her own mind and actions – by living in the present moment, in the here and now, which is the crux of the Buddha’s teachings. She coped with the initial ‘survivor guilt’ that gripped her by helping other tsunami victims and by documenting her experience. Now she was fulfilling goals she always meant to but never did, thus ensuring her psychosocial wellbeing.
“It so happens that my experience made me very reflective, and through that I became a much better person,” Ciranthi smiled. “I don’t think I was such a bad person before because when the tsunami happened I was not carrying any baggage; I was very ready to go. I was not afraid. I can’t explain that. I had my children, the most precious things in my life, next to me but what could I do? I couldn’t save them and they couldn’t save me. We were all doomed. It really hit me then that if you have to go, you go alone. No one could help you. That was the time I realized, ‘Come on, what are we doing here?’ The Buddha said you don’t have to go very far to find out. He said that everything is in this fathom long body; [9] so you look for it inside your own mind…. Everyone has flaws, and I am trying to correct my own. I think being a Buddhist actually makes life very simple. What you have to do is to develop a perception, a way to look at things. And once you have that mindset, everything falls into place.”
The Buddha’s teachings are centered on the Four Noble Truths. The first truth is that life is dukkha, meaning unsatisfactory. The second truth is dukkha arises because all component things change and are therefore impermanent. The third truth is that it is possible to eliminate dukkha, and the fourth teaches the way to do so – the Noble Eightfold Path, also known as the Middle Path.
The Middle Path is a philosophy, a worldview. The first step in this path is “Right Understanding” – the understanding that all mind and matter is constantly changing and is therefore anitya, dukkha, and anatma. When one sees the world through this lens, one is able to cultivate right thoughts so that greed, anger, malice, and other such attachments do not defile one’s mind. As Gnanaweera Thero once observed, once someone cultivates the first step, the other seven attributes of the Eight Fold Path invariably follow. These are: Right Thought; Right Speech (speaking only the truth words that benefit others and only when necessary;) Right Action (abstaining from killing living beings, stealing, and sexual misconduct;) Right Livelihood (abstaining from selling livestock, weapons, meats, drugs, alcohol, and poisons;) Right Effort (consistently striving to cultivate and develop one’s mind so that good or meritorious thoughts and intentions are increased and negative ones are decreased and eliminated;) Right Mindfulness (constantly being aware of one’s bodily actions, perceptions, sensations, and mind;) Right Concentration (maintaining single-minded mental focus in meditation, so one achieves the calmness of mind that enables him or her to develop his or her intuitive abilities to penetrate the worldly life and see reality as it is.)
The Buddha analyzed not only dukkha in its various manifestations, but also the various types of sukkha, meaning happiness, comfort, ease, contentment. But sukkha is also conditional and subject to change. Realizing that attachments to sense pleasures only increases dukkha because all pleasures are temporary, and by letting go of her materialistic desires, Ciranthi was finding sukkha. She was finding liberation from the mental stresses and strife come from cleaving, grasping, attachment. She was discovering that both dukkha and sukkha are ultimately mental conditions. Therefore, she said, she is now even glad she had the horrifying experience because “I am very content. I have no great desires for anything. It’s very strange, but this whole tsunami thing made me very, very free.”
Ciranthi’s change of perspective and the accompanying actions were a continuous sequence that flowed from the disaster. But we do not always see such harmony between thought and action leading to sustained behavioral changes in a short time span; changes that reverse or significantly change someone’s mode of thinking and habits usually develop over a life time. She herself observed this when, talking about the response of the larger society soon after the disaster she said, “At the beginning, when people were helping those who lost everything, even those who were helping were desperate. They didn’t know how to handle their emotions because something of this magnitude had never happened to anybody before. So, everybody was willing to donate, to give, to be humanitarian. But now, it’s a whole different story! The way I see it, it is propaganda again, it is bureaucracy again; people have gone back to the way they used to be. I think even some people who got caught to the tsunami are again settling back to life as usual although I don’t think they have actually forgotten how desperate and ferocious the experience was. I don’t think you can forget a thing like that.”
“Why do you think they have gone back to life as usual then?” I asked. Her response revealed she too realized the privileges afforded by her middle class status and her economic self sufficiency contributed significantly to her sense of psychosocial wellbeing. “For poor people who lost everything, life was always a struggle” she said. “They have to worry about where the next meal comes from. I don’t think they have the time sit down and reflect about what happened, and make something better of themselves. I think they just carry on the way they always did because they have to. They have no other choice but to say, ‘Well these things happen,’ and go on as they always did. It is a sad situation because reflecting on what happened can make you a much better person.”
I was curious to find out if her new insights about life and its vicissitudes, and her ability to detach herself from material pleasures, also enabled her to detach herself from her bonds with the children because the last time we met she said that after the disaster it became very important that she and the children stay in touch closely with one another. “No, staying in touch with them is still extremely important. I would eventually want to be with them and I think the feeling is mutual” she replied. “Everyday my daughter ‘texts’ me at least three times a day, and always before she goes to sleep, and I reply. Yesterday she forgot I was working and she wrote, ‘Ma, why are you silent, why haven’t you written?’ And both of them (the son and daughter) are also always on ‘SMS’ and ‘chat’ with each other. I think we miss each other a lot especially after this tsunami experience. We always want to know everything is alright with the other person. I am reading and trying to find out what the Buddha says about detachment, but the most difficult thing in his teachings is to be detached from those you love.” This is undoubtedly so, as told by Harshi, Sisira, and Nihal, Latha, and their families too. This is why, when I met Dr. Prabhath, who survived the tsunami while many family members died, I was truly astonished by the way he was coping with the tragedy.
***
I met Dr. Prabhath at the first year dana the Talpe monk organized in the memory of all those who died in the tsunami. The doctor is the nephew of one of Sri Lanka’s foremost monks, Ven. Weligama Gnanaratana Thero. I knew they lost many family members because when I visited him, the monk gave me a small booklet he had written. Dr. Prabhath had it printed and distributed freely as a meritorious act for their loved ones. It was entitled “The four natural laws that fall on humans.” These four laws, which the Buddha called ‘four boulders’ are: aging, infirmity, calamities, and death. Even though he had been hit so hard by calamity and death, the doctor was remarkably calm when I met him and intrigued by his demeanor, I asked for an interview. He bade me to come to the Karapitiya hospital in Galle where he works. There, we spoke for about two hours in a consulting room.
I began by asking the doctor if it was possible for him to talk about what happened. “Yes, that was a public holiday, a poya day, and I was on leave,” he said with no visible or audible discomfort. “We lived in Hambantota then and my wife and I planned a trip to Kataragama and invited my parents, sisters, and other family members to go with us. After we finished breakfast everyone went outside. I was still inside looking for something when I heard them shouting and ran out. I can’t remember if I saw the waves, and didn’t see what happened to the others. All I remember is being swept by the water and getting hold of a bush, and someone helping me to go to the hospital.”
At the hospital, his colleagues helped him to overcome the initial confusion and then took him to the home of some relatives. Later they all went to search for survivors and found one sister-in-law alive. Dr. Prabhath’s home was partially destroyed and many dead bodies lay inside and outside, but none were of his relatives. They found the bodies of his parents-in-law, but not those of his wife, parents, sisters, and other missing loved ones. “Altogether 12 family members died, but we found only two bodies. Our home was near the mosque, in front of the levaya (salt pan.) They probably got washed into it,” Dr. Prabhath said. He recounted all this without shedding a single tear or even a quiver in his voice. He was 35 years-old. His wife, a social worker, had been 33. They had fallen in love and had married a year and a half before. They had no children. There had been nothing left of his wife’s belongings.
The doctor now lives in his parents’ home in Weligama, with an aunt and her daughter. He had donated some belongings of his parents to needy people, but even after a year, was still unable to bring himself to open the suitcases containing the belongings of his three sisters that their friends had brought. Two had been university students and the third, a medical student.
Before the tragedy, Dr. Prabhath had worked at the Hambantota hospital. His request to move to Karapitiya hospital where we met had been approved before the tsunami, but the Hambantota hospital would not release him due to lack of staff. After the tragedy he reported for duty at Karapitiya on January 5, 2005. “With your wife, parents, and nine other family members dead, how did you find the strength to come to work nine days later?” I asked, shocked. Dr. Prabhath thought deeply. “The strength comes from my religion,” he replied. “My relations helped me tremendously by looking after me, and arranging the funerals of my parents-in-law and the seventh day dana, but I think the strength comes mainly from my religion.”
As we talked, it became evident that although Dr. Prabhath is trained in western medicine, his southern roots and his close association with his uncle and other monks ensured that his upbringing was significantly influenced by Buddhism. Still, I could not understand how he could remain so calm as he recounted his story. Ciranthi had escaped PTSD but she did not lose loved ones and was economically secure. The doctor was also economically secure; but his wife, parents, three sisters, parents-in-law and other kin perished in such a horrendous manner! Mystified, I asked which specific parts of the teachings he found helpful.
“(The concept of) Anitya,” the doctor replied. “There is no way for anything to remain forever. Whether it’s your mother or father or anyone else, all of them will ultimately leave you. And we know about the Ata Lo Dahama (see above,) so we must be prepared to face any situation in life without going to extremes. Whether we experience sadness or happiness, we have to get used to that condition,” he said, quietly. By now I was well versed in these concepts, but having seen the toll the tragedy had taken on other survivors who lost loved ones, I was not convinced Dr. Prabhath could have come to terms with this unimaginable tragedy through Dhamma alone. “Were you not depressed at all?” I asked.
He said he could not eat lunch on the 26th but that he had dinner at his relative’s home. “From then on, my appetite was not affected” he said. “Could it have been due to shock?” I persisted. “May be it was due to shock. When the stress is overwhelming you can’t feel emotions and you become numb. But even after some time had gone by I did not become depressed. After I came back to work I worked as I always did”.
I wondered, was Dr. Prabhath so calm and confident because he works in the mental health ward? Was he a psychiatrist and did that help him to cope with the tragedy? But he said he had only recently chosen to specialize in that area of medicine and that he was studying for the first post-graduate examination in mental health. I wondered if receiving sufficient aid provided a partial explanation but he said he only claimed the 15,000 rupees per deceased person the government gave for funeral expenses. “I am quite able to manage financially and there are many others who needed that aid. I know some people who suffered much less damage than I did and still went after the aid. I didn’t because I stopped to think about the nature and meaning of life. Also, to take what I don’t need is against the Buddha’s teachings.”
“So you mean to say that you did not fall mentally, doctor?” I asked again.
“I did not fall mentally, and it was with the help of my religion and because others helped me” he said.
“Do you have nightmares?” I asked.
“No, no!” he laughed.
I asked Dr. Prabhath if he ever dreams of those who died. He said he dreamt of his wife the first few months. “They were generally happy dreams in which we were doing things with other people. But I couldn’t stay with my wife, she always went away in all of them. I couldn’t even touch her.” Those dreams did not keep him awake, however, and he doesn’t dream of her these days. I asked if he cried a lot after the tragedy.
“Not for a prolonged time. Even the psychiatrists at this hospital told me that it was alright to cry if I wanted to, but I did not need to,” he replied.
According to psychoanalyst John Bowlby, adults who demonstrate prolonged absences of conscious grieving are generally self-sufficient, independent people, in control of themselves. They scorn sentiment, regard tears as a weakness, and take pride in appearing to cope well with grief. However, says Bowlby, others who know them well can sense signs of stress: they are tense, short tempered, and avoid talking about the deceased. O’Hara and Volkan note that particularly when loved ones die violently, survivors face added complications. Grief is often followed by anger; but expressing rage is too much an echo of the death itself.
Although the doctor did not avoid talking about the deaths, I wondered, did he not express grief because he might appear weak? But this was unlikely. Sri Lankan culture does not celebrate the stoic absence of grief reaction as happens in the U.S. On the contrary, in Sri Lanka failure to mourn and express grief is generally seen as a lack of love and caring for the deceased, and at one point he said, “I feel an immense sadness, how could you not?” So, why was he not consumed in grief? As we continued our conversation I realized the answer: he had shifted his attention from focusing on his own sense of loss and succumbing to grief, to looking at the process of life and death as explained by the Buddha. He focused on the nature of reality of this universe, on the principles of anitya, dukkha, and anatma, on rebirth – the Samsaric cycle – and on the universality of death.
“Death does not mean that our lives end there,” Dr. Prabhath said. “According to the Buddha’s dhamma, as we die, we gain another life. In other words, ‘living’ does not mean something that is static and confined to one lifetime, but something that is constantly changing, like a flowing river. When one life stops, we gain another bhavaya (form of existence). So, if we think that someone (who died) is not here, that is a fallacy. He or she exists somewhere else. The only difference is we don’t know where, and we have lost the connection we had to them.” This is what Mahathera Piyadassi meant when he said, “Life is not an identity, it is a becoming. It is a flux of psychological and physiological changes, a conflux of mind and body (nama-rupa.)”
The doctor continued. “My life is also anitya and when I die, the same thing will happen to me. In another 50 or 60 years most of us will be gone. When you look at the big picture, the only difference is that of time – we are around for a little longer than those who died. If we perceive life as a series of events that are constantly changing, constantly flowing, we realize that there is no point in feeling sad and depressed.”
Now he was almost talking to himself. “All these years I thought my wife and I will always be together. But life is not like that, is it? It flows on constantly and if we are born we have to die some day.” He looked at me again. “According to Buddhism, we may have been connected to those who are around us today in previous lives, but because we cannot look backwards (at previous lives) we don’t know who our mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, friends, were. We don’t know who we will meet in our next life either. My wife may have been my wife before, and I may meet her again in a future life. Or, we may have been together with different people in our past lives. So, there is little point in worrying or feeling sad about what happened, is there? The less attached we are the better, isn’t it?” he asked. I nodded. “The most important thing is to control your own mind. If you can do that, you will be healthy and you can go on with your life without descending into gloom”.
Volkan and Zintl say that it is only when one is able to tolerate the idea of losing that one can mourn effectively. “Loss,” whether from death or due to changing circumstances, is fundamental to Buddhist thought and his internalization of the Dhamma had enabled Dr. Prabhath to take an objective dispassionate view of all life, including his own. By constantly reflecting on this truth, the doctor avoided the psychosocial stresses and PTSD trauma victims usually suffer.
I was of course familiar with much of what he said but had never stopped to apply them to life. I was both fascinated and humbled by the power and wisdom of the Buddha’s teachings and the doctor’s emotional strength. Never before had I encountered anybody who had made the teachings so integral to his or her life that it enabled him to cope with such severe trauma without falling victim to it. I also thought that perhaps his profession itself made it easier for Dr. Prabhath to constantly reflect on death; treating patients who are infirm, aging, and dying, he confronts anitya, dukkha, and anatma as a matter of course. When we conceive of this world as impermanent, ‘loss’ is the reality of life. I could see all this now, but to make sure that somebody could actually experience this type of emotional balance after such a terrible catastrophe, I discussed the doctor’s response to the deaths of his loved ones with the two monks I consulted throughout this study, Suthadhara Thero and Santa Thero.
Santa Thero said, “When one meets sadness with the right understanding about the reality of existence, that all experiences are conditioned and that all things are impermanent, one is able to let go of his or her attachments and maintain a balanced perspective. The Buddha called this outlook pahan sanvegaya.” The term is perhaps best translated as “experiencing sorrow in a balanced way, without excessive grief.”
Suthadhara Thero said, “If someone regularly meditates on impermanence, and particularly on death, he or she will develop the calmness and equilibrium and overcome emotions with dignity and peace.” There are 40 meditation topics in Buddhism, and meditating on the topic of death, known as maranasmruthi bhavana (mindful reflection on the impermanence of all component things) is one of them. The monk also reminded me that as we gain mastery over our feelings, consciousness, perceptions, and so on through constant mindfulness of our thought processes, bodily actions, and speech, we will not be controlled by emotional responses to the Ata Lo Dahama.
I asked the doctor about his future plans and his replies again indicated he had worked through his grief, but there was no doubt his perspective of life had changed significantly as a result of the tragedy. Echoing Ciranthi, he said he has only short-term plans now, the most immediate being to pass the first examination in psychiatry. Before the tragedy, he had planned to build a big house in Weligama and to start a general practice there. “I even put up a building for that purpose and was waiting for my transfer to Karapitiya. Now I will use that building for a garage!” he laughed heartily. I asked if he will marry again. He replied people have brought proposals of marriage, but that he was yet to go to see potential partners. “I will think of other things only when my examination is over.”
“If you were to get married, what sort of a person would you want?”
“Someone who would be close to my wife in age and personality. She was a social worker and she was very understanding. She had very good qualities. She always supported me in any undertaking and we did almost everything together.”
His answer made it easier to understand how he had managed to move on with his life also. Volkan and Zintl note that when people had happy and mature relationships that were complementary rather than dependent or ambivalent, it is easier to let go of attachments and to grieve more fully. I believe this is because there is little regret or a feeling of abandonment for the one left behind because mutual obligations were more or less fulfilled.
If this is so, Dr. Prabhath’s relationships with his parents and other family members also must have been healthy and fulfilling. In Kalama Sutta the Buddha advised a young man named Kalama on the mutual obligations between parents and children, husband and wife, teachers and students, employers and workers. Perhaps the doctor had fulfilled his obligations to his parents and other family members and thus does not experience the despondence that results from unfinished tasks. Amal too said that because he and Suneetha fulfilled their obligations to the family, religion, and society, it was easier to bear their losses.
In the words of the Buddha, ‘loss’ connotes another meaning in relation to how we normally live and perceive life. We are all lost in the vast and unknowable sea of samsara – lost in and among the entrapments of materialism; in our desires and craving to satisfy our senses; in our love and attachment for, or dislike and hatred towards, various people, circumstances, things, and even ideologies. And forgetting that everything is subject to change, we strive to satisfy our desires and attachments by any means, sometimes even if it means stealing, warring, killing, and coercing. But even after achieving them, we want more of this and or more of that, and lost in our desires we subject ourselves to more losses and more grief. We will stop this process only when we realize this truth and develop and cultivate our minds so we appreciate and enjoy the present moment without cleaving and attachments. In the doctrine of Dependant arising or causal conditioning (paticca-samuppada,) the Buddha shows how mental formations arise and how they cease. [10] Treading this middle path helps us to develop a balanced outlook on life.
I often think that one advantage to growing older is that it allows us the opportunity to review our lives; that we get a second chance to steer ourselves towards a higher mental development so we become better people. But as I listened to the doctor, I did not think that at 35 years of age Dr. Prabhath had yet reached that stage. And as if he read my thoughts he said, “I can’t help thinking that this strength, this mind set, is one that I have been cultivating through many life times. Because when I look back, even I am surprised that I possess such strength. Even my sleep was not affected due to this”. As mentioned before, according to the Buddha, it is not a soul, but the stream of consciousness we have been cultivating through our lives that we carry forward to future births.
“I started to think more deeply after this tragedy. It showed me how important it is to think about how I have been living my life,” the doctor said, again echoing Ciranthi. “If we look at our normal lives, what do we do? We go to school, then start working, get married, and have children. How many of us make the time to stop and reflect on what we are doing, what we are thinking? The way we live these days doesn’t leave room for such reflections. But if more people stop even for a bit and lean towards the Buddha’s teachings and start to reflect about the way they live, they will improve their standard of living and we can improve as a nation too.”
***
Since I did not conduct ethnographic research in Japan, I can only provide a very brief account, based on an NHK program aired on March 10, 2012, of how Japanese tsunami survivors are doing a year after the disaster. As mentioned in Chapter Four, mourners go through different stages of grief. It appears that in Minamisanriku, where 274 people are still considered missing, about 50 per cent survivors were yet to accept the deaths of their loved ones even after a year of the disaster; they had not applied for death certificates that the Japanese government started issuing three months after the disaster so survivors can receive insurance payments. But as the first anniversary approached, some came to terms with the fact that their loved ones may have died and performed funeral rituals.
As mentioned in Chapter Four, the presence of the body is very important in Japanese funerals, and a father in Minamisanriku who lost his son, a town official who died when the tsunami engulfed the Disaster Control Center, expressed the ambivalence that all survivors of the missing must feel even as they perform the final rites. “How depressing! To honor my son, I have to hold a funeral without his ashes. But if I don’t, I feel my son cannot rest in peace,” he said. At the funeral, soil (presumably from the son’s home) and letters written to him by his children were brought in place of the ashes. So, the father said good bye to his son, but he is still waiting for closure. Police are still searching for the missing, and 458 bodies are waiting to be identified through DNA testing. The father said, “I am hoping DNA tests identify my son soon. I am expecting that will happen. I can’t bear to think of my son’s body lying somewhere, unattended.”
Another parent, a mother who lost her son, a volunteer fire fighter in Fukushima Prefecture who was swept away while helping residents to evacuate, had not even be able to search for his body: their home stood in the 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant and the public is prohibited from entering it. But two days before the anniversary, she was allowed access to the location where her son was last seen alive, behind their home. She knelt down there sobbing, and apologized to her son for not being able to search for him. But feeling her son would want her to move on, she too finally accepted his death and held a funeral service for him.
The public too paid their respects to those who died in various ways. On the first anniversary of the disaster, a steady stream of visitors came to Okawa primary school where many children died. It had become an informal shrine. The president of a company producing parts for power generators brought a bus load employees to the spot from the port of Kobe in eastern Japan because he said, “It tears my heart….If you don’t come here, you can’t understand how bad things were.”
While rituals contribute significantly to the welfare of survivors, a government survey revealed that about 20 percent of survivors have difficulties sleeping, and that the percentage who says they are depressed is higher than the national average. While the loss of loved ones is no doubt a major factor, the loss of their homes, the way of life, and the disintegration of the closely knit families and communities as more and more survivors migrate to other areas are heightening the sense of grief and hopelessness, particularly among the elderly, whom doctors and psychiatrists report they are seeing more and more.
Recognizing this, some survivors are trying to help them and their efforts enable us to see just how terrible life has become for them. The efforts of a woman in Ofunato, who, with a group of helpers, has been delivering packaged meals to those in need three times a week brings us a look at the plight of the elderly in the Tohoku region.
The average age of people this group delivers food to is 75, and most people live alone. One woman they serve is almost blind, and unable to bathe without someone’s help. She lost many family members to the tsunami and passes most days inside her home, without speaking to anyone. “Sometimes, I feel I am about to go crazy. Why is it that I have to live like this? I am really sad!” this old lady has told the volunteer.
But it is not only females who seem to have lost the will to live. A volunteer says men are even more vulnerable to falling victims to depression because many have trouble making new friends or expressing their feelings, and are too proud to ask for help. “They have lost confidence in themselves after losing their jobs. So, they shut themselves in their homes ….Some people say that the tsunami took out the heart of the community....” With more and more of their families, friends, and neighbors migrating to other areas, the elderly seems to be giving up. In the year past, five elderly people had died in their temporary shelters, perhaps alone, because a volunteer says they are determined not to let them die alone.
A fisherman, also in Ogatsu, who lost his home, car, and a boat to the tsunami, but has started the recovery process – he has formed a company with other fishermen to accelerate the recovery of their trade cultivating scallops, oysters, and other seafood – understands exactly how the elderly feels. He tells the reporter, “I suppose my ancestors also had hard times and suffered tsunamis, but they kept living here,” he said. “I don’t feel as if I would be able to face them if I was to just give up and run away.”
***
Before the nuclear accident, about a third of the country’s electricity needs were supplied by nuclear power. But as the first anniversary of the disaster approached, 52 of the country’s 54 plants were closed for safety checks and the remaining two were due to be closed soon. The questions, if they should be reopened, and if the country should continue its dependence on nuclear power to meet its energy needs, are now polarizing the country. On the first anniversary of the disaster, NHK reported that tens of thousands of people participated in organized protests in Tokyo and other large cities against the use of nuclear power.
The reconstruction plans of the devastated region calls for transforming it into an area for the development of renewable energy, and for the redirection of investment, research, and innovation towards wind, solar, and biomass. But developing these industries will take years. In the meantime, the energy needs of the country must be met, and it seems to me that Japan has only two options: to import other energy sources which might result in higher utility prices for consumers, or cut back considerably on electricity supply. Both will make life harder for the people of this high-tech country who rely on modern machines and gadgets to fulfill their daily need, and also hugely impact manufacturing, with serious consequences for the economic well being of the country. Therefore, as mentioned, the Japanese government is not about to shut down the nuclear energy industry, though Prime Minister Noda announced at a UN meeting that efforts will be made to develop new strategies for cleaner energy.
In looking at lessons learned from the disaster a year later, NHK reported that in February of 2012, the government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency came up with 30 proposals to improve safety at nuclear power plants, with a major focus on securing adequate back-up power; maintaining cooling functions; and preventing hydrogen explosions. The national broadcaster reported it conducted a survey on power companies’ adaptation to meet the requirements of the 12 most important proposals, and found that the companies have taken adequate measures to ensure that cooling functions would be maintained when external power is lost, and that they have diversified back-up power systems at all nuclear plants by locating mobile generator units. However, they were yet to meet the goal of enhancing the capacity of the emergency back-up battery systems, a requirement specially emphasized by the government. [11]
NHK also reported that the 30 proposals will likely serve as the basis for standards when municipalities decide whether or not to allow the restart of idled plants. But because the agency failed to specify when or how the proposals must be implemented, NHK said that one observer speculated that they will only confuse power companies and local municipalities. “The government must at least clarify the criteria necessary to judge the capacity of important facilities and then advice municipalities on ways to assess whether or not adequate safety measures have been implemented,” he said.
Following the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the nuclear industry had suffered a considerable global set back, but with climate policies demanding reliable low-carbon power, governments had come to accept the need for nuclear power as part of their energy mix. By 2011, there were 324 proposed new reactors around the world, with Asia at the fore front of the revival. China would be home to 27 of some 62 being built, and the US and Europe had also begun constructing new plants. Italy, Sweden, and Finland, and several eastern European countries were considering doing so as well and any delays, as in the US, had resulted from economic rather than safety concerns. [12]
But after the Fukushima accident, Germany banned using nuclear power in favor of other types of renewable energy. While the US did not issue a ban, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered stricter safety measures for nuclear power plants, requiring plants to upgrade equipment to make it possible to deal with any loss of power, and to install instruments to monitor water levels in pools of spent fuel rods. Operators with the same or similar reactors to the Fukushima plant are required to improve venting systems to properly reduce pressure in reactor containment vessels.
In Japan, even if power companies implement the recommendations successfully, and the government promises to investigate scrupulously what kind of nuclear industry it should have, whether they can win public’s acceptance for the projects is doubtful. As British journalists, David Pilling and Mure Dickie point out, the Japanese government’s mishandling of the accident from the beginning; revelations of inadequate monitoring of the industry by government regulators; confusion over evacuation areas; discovery that produce, ranging from spinach and lettuce to beef from hundreds of cattle contaminated with levels of radioactive cesium far above the official limit had been distributed to shops nation-wide; the plight of the tens of thousands of nuclear IDPs; problems of safe disposal of nuclear debris; the continuing fragility of the stricken plants and TEPCO’s inability to contain the crisis, all eroded confidence in the government and its abilities to protect the population from radiation exposure.
Recent revelations that the Japanese government downplayed the full danger of the accident in the days after the disaster and that it secretly considered evacuating Tokyo’s metropolitan area, have only deepened the mistrust and underscore lessons the Japanese government needs to learn, says Funabashi. [13] These are: the critical need to accept the concept of risks in the nuclear energy business, and learning to prepare for the unthinkable and unanticipated by being constantly vigilant regarding the safety and security of nuclear plants, as well as practices of nuclear waste disposal; and accepting the need for a regulatory body independent of the industry, bureaucrats, and academics working to promote nuclear energy.
Funabashi also says that Japan should look back upon the crisis with an appropriate sense of vulnerability and humility, recognizing and never forgetting the uncontrollably destructive power of the nuclear monster once unleashed. What he says next shows just how crucial this point is not just for Japan, but all nuclear powered countries: “But for the direction of the wind – towards the Pacific, not inland, in the four days after the earthquake; but for the manner in which the gate separating the reactor-well and the spent-fuel pool in Unit 4 broke – presumably facilitating the transfusion of water into the pool – the imagined “worst case scenario” would have occurred.” So, the crucial question that all countries depending on nuclear power must ask, and answer honestly is, can humans ever make nuclear power plants absolutely fail-proof?
Exactly thirteen months after the Japanese disaster, on April 11, 2012 an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the Western coast of Sumatra brought tsunami warnings to many countries, including Sri Lanka. Although no tsunami arose, the quake and the warning were harsh reminders of Sri Lanka’s new reality – its extreme vulnerability to the powers of nature. Unlike in 2004 however, the country now has a Ministry of Disaster Management and a Disaster Management Center, and the region has a new Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System, installed in June 2006.
But what use are these when, with the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, local and global entrepreneurs have been allowed to uproot thousands of acres of salt marshes and mangrove forests in the name of ‘development’ – to build tourist hotels, resorts, salt production plants, and prawn farms among other ventures – in the coastal areas of the former war zones? How serious is the problem? In 2012, the Environmental Conservation Trust claimed that the mangrove forest cover in Sri Lanka which was 11500 hectares in 1994, has dropped to a figure between 6,000 to 7,000 hectares. [14]
While Japan appears to be focusing on preventing future tragedies to communities from tsunamis by relocating them on higher ground, the Japanese government does not seem to be moving away from nuclear power. Therefore, it seems to me the best way to conclude this study is by reminding the two countries a line from a Buddhist hymn sung by a women’s choir in Ogatsu, Japan, at a memorial service held for tsunami victims:
The power of nature is beyond all human understanding [15]
Failing to keep this truth in mind and returning to the viewing nature purely through a utilitarian lens and continuing the culture of corruption, environmental devastation and degradation, and the negligence of sustainable development in coastal areas will surely ensure that sea-born complex disasters will again and again inflict severe punishments on societies of any country.
“Assessing Mental Health and Psychosocial Status in Communities Exposed to Traumatic Events: Sri Lanka as an Example”. Gaithri A. Fernando, Ph.D. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Vol. 78, No. 2, 229-239.
Fernando credits H.C. Triandis for this definition.
Flannery, Raymond B. Jr. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Victim’s Guide to Healing and Recovery. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994. See also “The Language of Disasters: A Brief Terminology of Disaster Management and Humanitarian Action” by S.W.A. Gunn, M.D. in Basics of International Humanitarian Missions. Kevin M. Cahill, M.D., ed. New York: Fordham University Press and The Center for International health and Cooperation. 2003.
The Pali term is atthaloka dhamma
Mahathera Piyadassi. The Spectrum of Buddhism: Writings of Piyadassi. Sri Lanka: Karunaratne & Sons Ltd.,1991.
A coconut-based alcohol.
Volkan Vamik D., M.D. and Elizabeth Zintl. Life After Loss: The Lessons of Grief. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993.
Nehru, Jawarlal. The Discovery of India . London: Asia Publishing House, 1956.
A ‘fathom’ equals two yards.
See Walpola Rahula’s What The Buddha Taught.
NHK. “Lessons Learned” program, aired on March 11, 2012.
“Global industry faces ‘decisive moment,’ warns Merkel. Financial Times, March 14, 2011.
Funabashi, Yoichi. “My findings in the existential fallout from Fukushima.” Financial Times, March 10/11 2012.
“Mangroves destroyed to make way for concrete” in Daily Mirror, September 8, 2012.
“Stricken nation reflects on the fragility of life.” Financial Times. March 12, 2012.