April 2005

Project oru: A reporter’s account of one personal mission

Eric Ellis

MARWELA is a fishing village of about 700 people in Sri Lanka’s deep south, six hours by road from the bustling capital of Colombo. It’s a sleepy but cheerful place where two years ago my wife, Sara, and I bought land so we could build a sanctuary far from the crowds of Singapore, our home base.

We soon made friends in the village. Often we would stop by our neighbor Sunil’s house for sweet tea with him, his wife, their three children and the kids’ 80-year-old grandmother, whom we all call Umma, Sinhala for “mother.”

Their house, five meters from the sea, is on the way to our as-yet-undeveloped plot, where we used to drink coconut milk from our own grove, dream and partake of paradise. Then came the water. My wife and I cut short our holiday in Tasmania, and I flew alone to Sri Lanka. A few days later I walked down Marwela’s beach bearing bags of food, medicine and clothes, and the concerns of ten foreign families, based in Hong Kong, Karachi, London, Melbourne, Paris and Singapore, who also owned property in the village.

Marwela was now cut with new channels and lagoons, its beach ten meters higher. I found Sunil and his family safe, but more than 100 villagers had died, 30 at a Buddhist temple just below our plot. The survivors told me I was the first outsider to arrive. They kept saying, “your land, the water hit your land.” Most of Marwela’s fishing fleet had been destroyed — news I included in my e-mail to the families who couldn’t return to the village.

Someone suggested that we “foreign friends” help rebuild the fleet. Good idea, but read on by subscription here