There can be many angles with with we can approach the post-tsunami Sri Lanka. There's tourism, housing, environment, infrastructure for the fishing industry, and then there are the orphanages and the impact on the children.
Children. Read this by a reporter Stan Grant, and see if you can ignore them.
Grant was writing in early January about seeing the bodies of three small children recovered from the beach.
From where I stood, I could see that they were children. No more than babies really, aged maybe between 1 to 3. From a distance, it just really didn't look real. They looked almost like mannequins or dolls.
But as we got closer, I saw their arms were locked around each other. They were hanging on to each other.
Their bodies had been tossed in the torrent ... as it came through. Somehow these three little kids had hung together and died together.
He stoppped being a reporter, and realized that he was a father, first:
I remember standing there, looking, and I couldn't help thinking about my own children. I have three little boys of my own. And I know I look in on them sometimes before they are about to go to bed, and they are often lying there and they have their arms around each other.
Looking at these three little children, with their arms around each other, reminded me so much of my own kids. And I started thinking about the little things that matter.
This kind of reporting stopped us in its tracks. Sure this is a CNN reporter, but this is much more than a 'news story.'
Another angle.
Here's another writer with another great story about how religious and ethnic differences suddenly disappear. Jeff Greenwald writes for Ethical Traveller:
While we relax, Dilan (who is from Kandy) tells us that the monk we hope to see — Thibbotuwawe Sri Sumangala — did something rather extraordinary, given the events of 1998. Four days after the tsunami, he and his monks loaded 26 trucks full of food, medicine, and supplies. They drove the trucks due east, and delivered the supplies directly into the hands of the Tamils near Trincomalee.
"It was a way of saying that religion doesn't matter," explains Dilan. "For the past 20 years, Sinhalese and Tamils can't find a chance to talk to each other. With this disaster, there is an opening to communicate — so we give help to them, from the bottom of our hearts."
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