NAVALADY, Sri Lanka – Two hundred yards away from the beach, in the
orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday
morning. He was thinking about the sermon he was due to deliver in the
chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the 28 children under
his care were still in their rooms, getting ready for services.
Then he heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room,
and his wife burst through the door, a frantic look on her face.
"The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the sea!"
Thanks to quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow
started on the first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the
ranks of countless survivors of the epic earthquake and coastal
disaster that so far has claimed the lives of an estimated 78,000
people in Sri Lanka and 11 other countries. This is their story.
It is also the story of their chief rescuer, Mr. Sanders, a Sri
Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live
in Gaithersburg, Md., where he once owned a townhouse.
A
member of the country's Tamil ethnic minority, Mr. Sanders, 50, studied
to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to
Switzerland in the 1980s to work with Tamil refugees displaced by
fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan government forces, which
have been observing a cease-fire since 2002.
In 1994, Mr.
Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady, a fishing
village that occupies a narrow peninsula on Sri Lanka's economically
depressed east coast, 150 miles northeast of Colombo, the capital. He
built the orphanage with donations and money from the sale of his
Maryland townhouse, he said.
With ocean on one side and a
lagoon on the other, the 4-acre orphanage was a strikingly beautiful
place, set in a grove of stately palms. The children – some of whom had
lost their parents in the civil war – lived four to a room in
whitewashed cottages with red tile roofs, attending school in the
village nearby.
On Sunday morning, Mr. Sanders said, he
rose at his customary hour of 4 a.m. to wander the grounds and pray,
then went back to bed. He woke up again around 7:30. He recalled the
stillness. Not a breath of air stirred the surface of the sea. Small
waves rolled listlessly onto the beach, then retreated with a gentle
hiss.
"It was so calm and so still," he recalled. "The
surface of the ocean was like a sheet of glass. Not a leaf moved."
It isn't clear who saw the wave first. His wife, Kohila, said she was
alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as
Mrs. Sanders was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-daughter. Mrs.
Sanders ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building sea. Even
the color of the water was wrong: It looked, she said, "like ash."
She ran to tell her husband, who told her not to panic, he recalled. "I
said, 'Be calm. God is with us. Nothing will ever harm us without his
permission.' "
Wrapped in a sarong, he ran outside and
looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he said, was a "30-foot
wall of water," racing toward the wispy casuarina pines that marked the
landward side of the beach.
With barely any time to think,
let alone act, he ran toward the lagoon side of the compound, where the
launch with its outboard motor chafed at a pier. By then, many of the
children had heard the commotion and had also run outside, some of them
half-dressed. Mr. Sanders shouted at the top of his lungs, urging them
all toward the boat.
Desperate, he asked if anyone had
seen his daughter, and a moment later one of the older girls thrust the
toddler into his arms. Mr. Sanders heaved her into the boat, along with
the other small children, as the older ones, joined by his wife and the
orphanage staff, clambered aboard. One of his employees yanked on the
starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life – something
that Mr. Sanders swears had never happened before.
"Usually you have to pull it four or five times," he said.
Crammed with more than 30 people, the dangerously overloaded launch
roared into the lagoon at almost precisely the same moment, Mr. Sanders
said, that the wall of water overwhelmed the orphanage, swamping its
single-story buildings to the rafters.
"It was a thunderous roar, and black sea," he said.
The orphans' ordeal did not end when their boat pulled away from the shore.
Not only was water cascading over the lagoon side of the peninsula, but
it also was pouring in directly from the mouth of the estuary about two
miles away. Mr. Sanders feared the converging currents would swamp the
small craft. At that point, Mr. Sanders said, he recalled a line from
the Book of Isaiah: "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the spirit
of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it."
He
raised his hand in the direction of the flood and shouted, "I command
you in the name of Jesus – stop!" The water then seemed to "stall,
momentarily," he said. "I thought at the time I was imagining things."
With the water pouring into the mouth of the lagoon, he then began to
worry that waves would overtake them from behind, swamping the small
boat. Reasoning that it was better to hit the waves head on, he said,
he ordered the driver to reverse direction and head back toward the
open ocean.
But that maneuver carried its own risks. As it
made for the mouth of the lagoon, the boat was broadsided and nearly
capsized by the torrent pouring over the peninsula. "The children were
very frightened," Mrs. Sanders, 30, recalled. "We were praying, 'God
help us, God help us.' "
As the waters began to roll back
out to sea, the turbulence subsided. It was then, Mr. Sanders and his
wife recalled, that they became aware of the people crying for help as
they bobbed in the water nearby. They were villagers who had been swept
off the peninsula.
The passengers rescued one young man,
who was "howling for his missing wife and daughters," Mrs. Sanders
said. But they had to leave the rest behind. There wasn't any room.
"People were crying, 'Help us, help us,' " Mrs. Sanders said. "Children were crying."
Eventually the boat made it to the opposite shore, about a mile and a
half distant in the city of Batticaloa. The Sanderses and perhaps a
dozen of the orphaned and now displaced children have found temporary
refuge in a tiny church; the rest have been sent elsewhere.
The city is short of food and water, and on Wednesday afternoon,
corpses were being burned where they had been found at the edge of the
lagoon. With more than 2,000 people dead in Batticaloa district, local
officials say that they lack the means to dispose of the bodies
properly and that residents are burning them as a precaution against
disease.
The scene at the orphanage was one of utter
devastation. The grounds were covered by up to 3 feet of sand. Several
buildings, including the staff quarters, were entirely wiped away, and
the others were damaged beyond repair.
Surveying the wreckage, Mr. Sanders broke down and cried.
"Twenty years of my life put in here, and I saw it all disappear in 20
seconds," he said between sobs. The orphanage had no insurance.
But at other moments, Mr. Sanders was philosophical about his loss.
"If there was anyone who should have got swept away by this tidal wave,
it should have been us," he said. "We were eyeball to eyeball with the
wave."
