ENTER THE DRAGON

What did I want to do for my birthday?

As questions go it seemed fairly innocuous. How about going for a Chinese I said? Somehow though this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I pressed my nose against the glass and peered out into the inky darkness. Thirty thousand feet below me central Russia lay slumbering beneath a blanket of stars. I was headed for Beijing and a date with a duck.

Few things in life can prepare you for Beijing; everything about it is, well foreign. For centuries it was the centre of the Chinese universe, the sun around which the empire revolved. Established as a capital by Kublai Khan in 1264, today it still holds sway over the vast landmass that makes up the Peoples Republic of China, its directives as much a mystery to the peoples of its outlying provinces as they are to us. A sprawling mass of glass, concrete and humanity, hiding within it some of the finest examples of the Imperial Age left on earth.

Its streets are huge wide thoroughfares, dead straight and aligned along east-west and north-south lines. Branching off from these vast boulevards are networks of dark alleyways, or ‘hutongs’, which snake and twist away from this central grid, their narrow passageways crammed to overflowing with produce, people and livestock. My hotel was situated in the centre of a network of these alleyways, the streets around it a cacophony of noise, colour and smells. I wandered aimlessly, picking my way past stalls and carts creaking under the weight of people and produce. At my feet bags and buckets thrashed about wildly, their occupants, a bewildering mix of frogs, snakes and fish, all apparently desperate to add to the general melee and confusion. I allowed myself to be swept along on a wave of humanity. Movement in Beijing is a constant flow, a ceaseless river: as a space becomes available it is immediately filled, by a cart, a bicycle, a person. I flowed along with it, a stranger in an even stranger land.

The following morning dawned clear and bright. I intended to spend it exploring the delights of the Imperial Palace and the Forbidden City. When you consider the wanton destruction of so much of the majestic beauty of the Imperial Age by successive hordes of Japanese, Koumintang and Communists troops, it is a miracle that monuments such as the Imperial Palace remain at all. In the 1940s there were 8000 temples in old Peking, by the 1960s these had been reduced to just 150. Small wonder then that a jewel like the Forbidden City gets 10,000 visitors a day.

So named because for 500 years it was off limits to all but a privileged few, the Forbidden City is the largest and best-preserved collection of ancient buildings in China. Once home to two dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, it covers an area of some 720,000 square metres and contains 800 buildings. It is estimated that it takes 10 years to do a full renovation of the Imperial Place, by which time the whole process is ready to begin again. It is opulence on the grandest scale and from the moment I entered through the massive portal of the Wumen Gate and looked out across the massive courtyard towards the Three Great Halls at the heart of the city, I was spellbound.

Crossing the Golden Stream, shaped to represent a tartar bow and spanned by five marble bridges, I wandered into the heart of the city. The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the most important and largest of the Three Great Halls. Raised on a marble terrace and originally built in the 15th century, it was used for ceremonial occasions. The entrance to the great hall is flanked by two huge incense burners and inside the hall is a fabulously decorated Dragon Throne from where the emperor would preside over his prostrate court as they banged their heads on the floor nine times. The western and eastern sides of the city house what were once the living quarters of the Emperor and his entourage. These buildings, containing once the libraries and temples, theatres and gardens of the great city, now house museums of bronzes, ceramics and Ming dynasty art. The exceptions are the Western Palaces, formally the living quarters of the empress and the concubines, which have remained untouched and today display the finery and trappings of a court of immense wealth and power.

The northern end of the Forbidden City is taken up with the Imperial Garden, a quiet haven of 7000 sq. metres, containing walkways and pavilions that are set in a classical landscape. I sat there, bathed in the glow of the late afternoon sun, taking in the decadent splendour of a bygone age and I could possibly be sitting there still were it not for the fact that I wanted to see Tiananmen Square before heading back to the hotel. Tiananmen is the heart of Beijing, a vast concrete desert, bounded on all sides by memorials to the past and present. Chairman Mao lies in state in his marble mausoleum here and every day crowds flock to gaze upon his corpse, or stand before the Monument to the Heroes. Much of the world still identifies Tiananmen with the ill-fated pro democracy riots of 1989 and the harrowing scenes of troops and tanks pitted against unarmed students, but as I stood here now it was difficult to equate the scene before me with those images of two decades ago. All around me families were making the most of the rapidly disappearing summer, children played and laughed and above my head huge kites of dragons and eagles swooped and spun in a colourful dance across the sky. My plan had been to stay and watch the flag lowering ceremony at sunset, before heading back, but the overwhelming mass of humanity flooding into the square made me think again. I left the square to the growing masses and headed back to the hotel.

Early mornings in Beijing are a time for the good citizens of this vibrant metropolis to indulge their passions before beginning the rigours of the day. So the following morning found me creeping out of the hotel and into the waking city just as the sun was beginning to rise. I was headed for Tiantin Park in search of culture, excitement and ballroom dancing! Tiantin means Temple of Heaven and the park itself is widely regarded by many as the perfection of Ming architecture. It was conceived as the meeting point of heaven and earth and for 500 years was the heart of imperial ceremony and symbolism. Once considered sacred ground it would have meant certain death to enter. Nowadays the price is slightly less exacting at just a few yuan.

It was a strangely discordant collection of sights and sounds that greeted me as I entered the park. Even at this hour it was full of people. Old men strolled past, deep in conversation, their hands tightly gripping bamboo cages that echoed to the warbling tones of solitary songbirds. Beside me an old man went through the unhurried trance like forms of Tai Chi, his sword reflecting the morning sun as it cut a gentle curve through the still air. Next to him middle aged couples dipped and spun to the distorted strains of a waltz. Suddenly the air was filled with the screeching wails of Chinese Opera and all around me the park seemed to come alive with movement and noise. Shaken from my reverie I moved off to explore the park.

Set in an area of some 270 hectares, the Temple of Heaven is a bewildering array of colour and symbolism. The four gates that lead into the park are set on the four compass points and the structures within are a numerologists dream. The temple buildings are all circular and set onto square bases, deriving from the ancient Chinese belief that heaven was round and the earth square. The centrepiece of the whole complex is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, a magnificent structure mounted on a three-tiered marble terrace and topped by three blue tiled roofs. It was here that the Emperor came to pray for the coming harvests and seek divine approval for the coming year. What makes this structure even more remarkable is the fact that it is made entirely of wood and stands without the aid of either nails or cement. I spent the morning visiting the buildings that make up the rest of the complex; The Imperial Vault of Heaven, The Round Altar, whose entire geometry revolves around the number nine (considered a divine number amongst the Imperial Chinese) and the Echo Wall, said to be a perfect whispering gallery, although somewhat difficult to prove amidst the general noise and chatter.

From Tiantin I headed across Beijing to the Lama Temple, which, according to my guidebook, was not only the most colourful temple in Beijing, but also the most renowned Tibetan Buddhist temple in China. Originally the former domicile of the Emperor Yong Zheng, it became a temple, as was the custom, upon his improved social status. In 1744 it was converted into a lamasery, becoming the residence for large numbers of monks from Mongolia and Tibet. Miraculously it survived the Cultural Revolution intact and today serves as an active Tibetan Buddhist Centre, although that is a somewhat contentious title, given the current Chinese policy towards Tibet.

Politics aside though and irrespective of any religious authenticity, the Lama Temple cannot be faulted as an aesthetic experience. Everything about it is a visual delight; its gardens, its frescoes, its tapestries and the heavy smell of incense all lend a magical quality to the place. At the heart of the temple is an 18 metre high statue of the Maitreya Buddha in his Tibetan form. Sculpted from a single piece of sandalwood and clothed in yellow satin, it is a truly inspiring sight. My personal favourites though were the Nandikesvaras, the copulating figures that had earned the lamasery its reputation as China’s most illustrious sex manual, one used to educate the sons of the emperor himself.

All this culture was making me hungry and I did, after all, have a birthday appointment to keep. The Chinese love to eat and can certainly boast one of the finest cuisines in the world. Beijing duck is probably the capital’s most famous culinary offering. The unfortunate duck is first force fed a diet of grain and soybean paste to fatten it up. Then it is lacquered with molasses, pumped with air, filled with boiling water, dried and finally roasted over a fruitwood fire. At some stage during this process one would also hope that it is killed. The whole process may appear a touch barbaric, especially if you are a duck, but the end result, I can assure you, is delicious. I feasted on duck soup, tender strips of duck with plum sauce and crepes, fortune cookies and Chinese beer, although I am pretty sure that the last two were not directly attributable to the duck.

And so ended my first couple of days. I still had the spectacles of the Summer Palace and the Great Wall to see, but as for the delights of Beijing itself, well it had certainly not disappointed. On the surface it is a city like many others, drab and dirty, a seething mass of humanity. But within its vast boulevards and crammed hutongs it hides a breathtaking array of beauty, reminders of an age of opulence and splendour at odds with its communist doctrines. It is a living paradox and with the onset of a new Imperial age for China and its headlong rush into the 21st century let us hope that these reminders of its previous golden age are not forgotten.

© Trevor Gibbs 2009

ADVENTURES IN ABYSSINIA

The Hyenas had vanished back into the darkness some time ago, seeking shelter from the driving rain. I should have gone with them. I had come to Ethiopia in search of adventure, but standing on the rooftop of a hotel in the small hours of a Friday morning, in the midst of a storm of almost biblical proportions, was not something I had bargained on. Neither had I envisaged spending my last hours in the country trying to talk an evangelizing, and very drunk, American down off the aforementioned roof

We were in a town called Harar, situated in the foothills of the Chercher Mountains, some 150 kilometres from the Somalia border. This was a town of conflict and contrast, a microcosm of African life, where Muslims and Christians had brokered an uneasy truce and the streets and alleyways positively screamed with colour and noise. For centuries the town had been a crossroads, an entrepot of commercial trade from Africa, India and the Middle East. It was from here that the Muslim armies of Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim al Ghazi had swept forth in a holy jihad against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This was a town with attitude, which still had a xenophobic mistrust of foreigners and the largest chat market in Ethiopia. This was not a town for drunken American evangelists.

I had flown into Addis a few weeks before, my ears still ringing from the inevitable, and it has to be said ill informed, comments of family and friends. Ethiopia still has a serious image problem. Years of news reports on famines and droughts and the seemingly endless conflicts with neighbouring Eritrea have clouded the perception of the outside world. This is a shame, because the reality is very different. Ethiopia is an undiscovered gem. Home to one of the oldest Christian civilizations in the world, it has an archaeological pedigree to match any of the great civilisations of antiquity and a cultural and natural diversity that can compare with anywhere in Africa. True it is one of the poorest places on the planet, but this is a country that has a heritage and a history stretching back millennia. Great empires rose and fell here whilst our ancestors were still running around in animal skins and woad mascara.

Addis Ababa is a relatively new city for a country that can boast such an ancient pedigree. An eclectic mix of the old and the new, where concrete and glass vie for space next to wattle and daub shacks and donkeys and taxis bray and honk in unison along the wide-open boulevards. But for all its potential it is still just a city, so first chance I got I headed north, towards Bahar Dar and Lake Tana. It is from here that the Blue Nile begins its 4,000 mile odyssey through sub-Saharan Africa, to meet up with the White Nile at Khartoum in Sudan before continuing north, to the shores of the Mediterranean.

It is a strangely unassuming beginning for such an epic journey. The river flows gently from the lake, between low lying islands ringed by papyrus and overgrown with jungle, its passing marked only by the odd lone fisherman in his papyrus boat, or a yawning hippo, basking in the early morning sun. It is not until it gets to Tissisat Falls that it begins to take on the mantle of a great river. Here it becomes the ‘smoking waters’ of legend, as it cascades over a sheer chasm and churns its way through a narrow-sided canyon. This was once one of the most spectacular waterfalls in Africa, a thundering torrent that was believed to contain evil jinns: demons waiting to grab the unwary and drag them down to a watery grave. These days, thanks to the building of a hydro-electric dam, the falls are a shadow of their former selves, but still impressive nonetheless and after the rains you can still imagine the odd demon waiting in the shadows for anyone unwise enough to stray too close.

Local transport is probably one of the best ways to truly appreciate travel in a foreign land. How can you not feel an empathy with a country and its people when you spend your days travelling on an old rusting bus next to a man with a loaded Kalashnikov! From Tissisat Falls I headed north, along dusty pitted roads into the religious heartlands, to the city of Aksum, reputed home of the fabled Ark of the Covenant itself. It was a journey that was to take me through a timeless landscape encapsulating something of the true diversity and history of this ancient kingdom. Sharing our road with cattle, chickens and a seemingly endless procession of large black umbrellas, I passed the days looking out across an ever changing tableaux: magnificent Imperial castles and lines of burnt out tanks, mountain plateaus where the breathtaking views where punctuated by uncountable hordes of Gelada baboons and all enveloped by a way of life that had remained unchanged for millennia.

We arrived in Aksum in time for the Easter celebrations, an important time for the Orthodox Christians. Of the numerous religious festivals practiced by the Ethiopians the two most important are Timkat and Easter. The three-day festival of Timkat is certainly the most colourful, Easter though has always required a more committed approach to worship. Fasika is the Orthodox Easter and marks the end of a fast that has lasted some 55 days, during which time no animal product at all can be consumed. Even the more traditional approach to Easter requires the populous to fast from the Thursday before Good Friday until the end of the Easter services at 3 am on Easter Sunday. The end of Easter in Ethiopia is something of a blood fest as the streets quite literally run with blood, not a good time to be an animal, or indeed a vegetarian.

My plan was to spend a few days here, recuperating from the journey and enjoying the spectacle. Aksum was once one of the most important cities in this region, the centre of an empire that rivaled those of Rome, Persia and China. An empire that controlled the Red Sea coast from Sawakin, south to present day Djibouti and even into southwest Arabia. It nurtured a civilization far in advance of its neighbours, building fabulous stone palaces and erecting giant monuments to its deceased rulers. Monuments that still stand to this day: huge carved stelae that are amongst the largest known in the ancient world. The Aksumites were also responsible for introducing Christianity to Ethiopia, small wonder then that there is still an unshakeable belief amongst its people that the Ark of the Covenant is indeed within their midst.

The stuff of legend and conjecture, sought by everyone from the Knights Templar to Indiana Jones, the Ark, the repository of the original tablets of stone brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses, is believed to have been brought to Ethiopia by the emperor Menelik I. Whatever your own personal thoughts on it authenticity, or indeed existence, there are few here who will publicly deny its presence. The Ark is central to the entire Orthodox faith, with every church, no matter how large or small housing a replica, known as the Tabot, within its sanctuary. The chapel that allegedly contains the Ark is a small unassuming concrete building with a decaying green domed roof, guarded by a lone figure with a gun. Within its inner sanctum dwells another lone figure, the Keeper of the Ark, whose life is dedicated to the protection of this most revered of biblical artifacts; a life that requires a total commitment that includes virtual imprisonment within the compound.

Never having considered myself a religious person, I was somewhat surprised to find I was becoming ever more wrapped up in these Easter proceedings. I even managed to drag myself up into the pre dawn light the following morning to witness a remarkable procession through the winding streets. Hundreds of white robed figures, their faces giving off an almost ethereal glow in the candlelight, walked through the town. At their centre a group of monks carrying a box, the size of a small tea chest, within which lay the symbol of their faith. A part of me truly wanted to believe that this small unremarkable box, just a few feet away from me, contained the most revered of all religious items, the words of God himself.

The ceremonies carried on throughout the following days, the town reverberating with the sound of singing and, as midnight approached and Easter Sunday drew nearer, drums began to sound throughout the town, accompanied by a hypnotic chanting that seemed to permeate every nook and cranny. I visited one of the smaller churches, drawn by the incessant sound of the drums. It was filled to overflowing, every piece of floor space taken up by prostrate figures, the younger ones seemingly oblivious to the goings on around them, content to spend the few remaining hours of fast dreaming of the forthcoming feasts.

The following morning I left the happy carnivores of Aksum to their banquets and flew down to Harar, a walled city of some 75,000 lying to the east of the staunchly Christian highlands. Harar was once a staunch Muslim bastion and, up until the latter part of the 19th century, completely closed to Christians. Also the birthplace of one Ras Tafari Makonnen, better known to most as the emperor Haile Selassie, this was a city like no other I had come across in Ethiopia. It was more vibrant than the towns of the Central Highlands and felt more Arab than African. There was also an underlying feeling of tension wherever I went: Christians were tolerated here, but only just.

For all its initial aggression though I liked Harar. From my hotel room I watched the chat sellers doing a brisk trade in their seemingly inexhaustible supply of the region’s main cash crop. Chat is a mildly intoxicating and perfectly legal stimulant that has been cultivated in Ethiopia for centuries and from my elevated vantage point it also appeared to be the prime preserve of the adult male population of Harar. Walking through the streets later that day I came across countless men resting up in the late afternoon sun, their eyes glazed and their teeth green from chewing bags of the stupefying leaves.

Harar’s network of narrow lanes crisscross the city, passing markets overflowing with spices and vegetables and streets filled to overflowing with barber’s shops, tailors and the ubiquitous beggars. I wandered past tiny mosques and Catholic schools, visited the house of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who spent 16 years of his life here and, in a back street of almost overwhelming obscurity, came upon the house were Haile Selassie grew up. It has now been taken over by a local family and although it is home to a local holy man and healer, who claims he can cure anything from sexually transmitted diseases to cancer, there were few people there when I arrived. Little wonder given the appalling stench and feeling of decay that assails the senses as you enter the yard. It was more open sewer than health centre and I beat a hasty retreat back out into the warren of alleyways, looking for more pleasant sights and smells.

One of Harar’s more famous spectacles is the nightly hyena feeding that takes place outside the city walls. Very much a tourist attraction these days, it does have its origins in a ceremony that stretches back hundreds of years and, in spite of its potential for crass commercialism, it does actually present something of a unique experience. Calling them in from the surrounding darkness the “Hyena man” feeds these wild dogs from a basket of offal, sometimes placing the tempting morsels between his teeth and allowing the more adventurous of the pack to snatch it, quite literally, from his waiting jaws. I counted upwards of 20 of them emerge from the trees and walk cautiously towards us, a somewhat disconcerting sight given that they could have torn us to pieces very easily had they been inclined. They seemed content to go with the easy option though, just as well given that our “armed” escort seemed to be holding his gun the wrong way round! I was mesmerized and it was only the onset of the rain and the end of the food supply that forced me to tear myself away.

The following morning I was heading back to Addis and from there back home, so I had planned on having a quiet dinner, a couple of drinks and an early night. Unfortunately sometime around midnight I had been rudely awoken by the hotel manager, asking if I could possibly help him retrieve an American from the roof. It appeared that he had made his way up there with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bible and was even now quoting scriptures to anyone who would listen. Now given that this was a town primarily populated by Muslims, many of whom by now were probably suffering the downside of a chat hangover, I felt it probably in all our interests to get him safely inside as soon as possible.

Which is why I am spending my last night in Ethiopia standing on a roof above the streets of Harar, in a torrential deluge, facing a man with an empty bourbon bottle a head torch and the book of Psalms. It’s never like this on the Holiday Programme!


© Trevor Gibbs 2009

PARADISE LOST

The first wave hit at 9.26 that morning. There was no warning, no chance to run, not even a chance to say goodbye. It tore through buildings, trees and lives with equal savagery. The train had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, ripped from the tracks by a ten-metre wall of water that had hit the coast at an estimated 800 kilometres per hour. Nearly 1500 people lost their lives on the train that day. But even more incredible was the fact that some had even survived.

Six months later, on the anniversary of that fateful day, I stood before the mangled wreckage of what had once been the Galle-Colombo express, now a twisted and permanent reminder of the Asian Tsunami that had rocked the world on 26 December 2004. An unstoppable and unquenchable wall of water that was to rip apart the lives of millions, from the western coast of Thailand, to the shores of Somalia in east Africa. The spot I stood on, a small fishing village called Peraliya, on the south-western coast of Sri Lanka, had been one of the worst hit areas, a fact made all too painfully clear by the sense of loss and devastation that still pervaded the place. The authorities claimed that 1,000 people died here, but local aid workers and residents put the figure closer to 2,500, testimony that would seem to be borne out by the black granite monument sitting within the tranquil setting of a copse of palm trees close to the beach. It is said that the dead are buried close by, next to a main road, along which life hurtles along at breakneck speed: overcrowded buses, three-wheeled tuk tuks and even the occasional cow all passing by with a seemingly cavalier disregard for life and limb.

Sri Lanka as an island has long captivated the hearts and minds of visitors to its shores, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to Arab traders and European colonists. Marco Polo declared it the finest island in the world and during its turbulent history It has been known by many names; Serendib, Ceylon, The Resplendent Isle and the Pearl of the Orient to name a few. But its most poignant epithet must surely be that of the Teardrop of India. I had arrived in this island paradise a few days before, to help project manage a rebuilding programme, just one of many being set-up throughout this region by a wealth of international aid agencies and charities. We all knew that these people needed help, but nothing could prepare me for the true scale of the disaster. Before the tsunami Peraliya had been a sizeable community of some 420 houses, within minutes of the tsunami hitting it had been reduced to 10. Many of its survivors still lived in tents or makeshift shelters. Some, like Manjou, were living in small wooden shacks, around which he had gathered his few remaining possessions and his few remaining family.

Manjou could probably be described as one of the lucky ones, he had survived after all, but his story was to become an all too familiar lament during my time here. The first wave had deprived him of his home, his place of work and all his tools; Manjou had been an electrician prior to the disaster. It also took his younger sister. The second wave hit whilst he and his two brothers were out looking for her. That was the last time he ever saw them. Manjou was swept two kilometres inland by the force of the water and by the time he returned to his village everything he had ever known was gone. He spends his days now making small wooden boats to try and get together enough money to get him and his remaining family through the day.

It was people like Manjou I was out here trying to help. Working in conjunction with groups of volunteers, my job was to try and help the process of recovery and regeneration along. Six months had gone by and the international outpouring of grief, money and support had apparently not really materialized into anything concrete, in any literal sense of the word. As I looked around at the job in hand I had to admit to a sense of overwhelming impotence and I wondered just how much I could do in the short time I was due to be out here. I was managing teams of complete strangers, and in some cases complete novices. People who in the world beyond this tragedy and destruction were human resource directors and civil engineers, lawyers and post room boys, all coming together with the same overwhelming wish, to help people who six months ago had been just a page in a travel brochure, but who now, because of the events that fateful day 6 months ago, were very much in the world’s conscience.

The plan was to try and build small basic homes, nothing fancy, just four walls and a roof, but something that would restore some dignity back to these people’s lives, something tangible that would show them that the world hadn’t forgotten. Something they could call home. It was hard and tiring work. The monsoons had arrived a few days before and the normally dry earth was fast becoming a quagmire and with temperatures breaking 100°C and humidity in the high 90s, we were faced with an almost Herculean task. The resident Water Buffalos didn’t seem to mind though and found the new pool, with en suite digger, something of a welcome respite from the oppressive heat. They became something of a regular feature over the coming days, almost as much a part of the site as the rubble and bricks.

Heat or no heat though we were determined, and we were dragged along, kicking and screaming on some days, by the infectious enthusiasm of the local families, who it seems were made of sterner stuff. Their quiet resolve and determination and their cheerful smiles were to become a regular feature of my time here and a constant source of wonder to me. And slowly the impossible began to happen. Foundations were dug and floors laid. Walls were built and rooms began to take shape. Some of the families even took to sleeping inside the houses at night, lying amongst the shovels and trowels as if afraid that the unforgiving darkness might swallow up their new homes. As the days progressed the task, whilst still momentous, did at least start to yield some tangible results. The heat and the exhaustion were replaced by the will to succeed and the desire to help people, who had by now become, if not friends, then at least part of the team. It was no longer us and them, it was us! Over the coming weeks the rains subsided, the ground dried out and the buffalos moved on. Life on site took on a regular routine, much of it invoking blood, sweat and a plentiful supply of tears in even the most hardy of souls.

But it wasn’t all work. The evenings also took on a pattern of their own too, one that gave me, and the others, the opportunity to see a bit more of the surrounding area and interact socially with the locals. I arranged river trips, where water monitors glided like aquatic dragons through the lush jungle waterways and local fishermen plied their trade in the time honoured fashion of generations before them. The provincial capital of Galle was only some 30 minutes drive away, an eclectic mix of colonial Dutch architecture and Sinhalese mayhem, whose solid fortress walls rose up from the now tranquil waters of the Indian Ocean. We watched boys playing cricket next to the destroyed buildings of the test ground and families walking the city walls in the warming glow of sunset. It all seemed a long way from the tented cities that ringed the outskirts. But everywhere we went there was the constant reminder of the tsunami, we couldn’t escape it. It was etched into the very fabric of the buildings and the faces of the people.

My time came to an end all too quickly. In spite of all I had tried to do I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of frustration that I seemed to have achieved so little. I had helped to build houses for people true and, in my own small way, hopefully given people with no hope something to cling onto. But it was just, for want of a better analogy, a drop in the ocean. The United Nations have claimed that it could take up to ten years to rebuild what nature’s fury destroyed in seconds and the cynic in me couldn't help but wonder just how long the world would continue to help, before another disaster took centre stage and our politicians moved on to another cause. Hurricane Katrina in the United States highlighted only too well our inability to cope with the forces of nature at her worst, not to mention our ability to move from one media sound bite to the next. If the richest country on the planet struggled with rebuilding her shattered coastline, then what hope Sri Lanka?

The Sri Lankans are a resilient and resourceful race and their smiling faces will live on in my memory long after the aches and bruises have passed, but they are only human. They, like the Indonesians and the Indians, the Thais and the Somalis, still need our help, not just to build houses, but also to rebuild lives. I spoke to a local aid worker before I left, a woman who had been there from the beginning, who was almost single handedly trying to nurse Perilaya back to health. Her parting words took on the mantle of an epitaph as I boarded the bus and took one last look back at the wooden shacks and tented villages.
 
“I need to sleep. Is there anyone out there that can help us?”

© Trevor Gibbs 2009