SRI LANKA ANIMAL RELIEF OPERATION

Opening thoughts

After working in the tsunami devastated areas of Sri Lanka, I returned to a pile of news clipping, emails, and questions. People asking what it was really like; If aid was reaching the victims? How people were responding to the losses? In hopes of sharing my experience, I took photographs. I ran out of ink writing in journals. So when people ask, I have plenty of pictures and words to offer.

But still I struggle. I struggle to share what it is like being invited into a home, now defined by a pile of bricks and a box. To have a mother point past a missing wall to the sea and explain where she last saw her three children swept away.

I struggle to explain the honesty of a man as he tells me how many people he saved, how many are missing and how many are dead in his sea side village. Then concludes by saying "missing and dead are the same thing."

I struggle to express the face of a child as she stands next to me pointing at a small field of freshly covered soil. It's her mother and father she is showing me. Somewhere beneath the dirt they lie with others of her village. She is grateful they are there and not lost at sea like her friend's brother.

Never before have I seen so many lose so much. Yet life continues. Smiles shine through the dust. Cuts begin to heal, and burning piles bid the past farewell. No one expects life to return to normal. Normal no longer exists. Nature is now embraced as a changing force that grants no immunity, even to simple island villages.