A mother's story from the south

The Burden of Independence

PERALIYA, Sri Lanka (Srilanka News)

The bleakness comes late at night, after the little shop is closed and her family is asleep, and the pain from her son's death tears at her like a raw wound.

Lately, that's when the neighbors have heard her crying , her sobs clearly audible through the roughhewn wooden shelters where most people have lived since the tsunami destroyed this seaside village on a December morning. In a place where nearly every home is burdened by its own mourning, the sound frightens people.

Sriyawathi Malani Gunathilaka had always been a strong woman. Her grief sometimes seemed overwhelming in those early days, after her son's grip slipped from a palm tree during the tsunami and the waves swept him to his death, but she was able to cope. She had a family to care for, she repeatedly insisted, she had to be strong for them.

But coping has become increasingly difficult.

"As time goes by, I think about him more and more," Sriyawathi , 54, said on a recent afternoon, sitting on a plastic child's chair in the one-room shelter she shares with her husband. In her hands, she kneaded a thin blanket. "It's the only thing on my mind ... The hole he left in our lives."

Three months have passed since the tsunami savaged Peraliya , destroying hundreds of homes and killing nearly 1,300 people, 800 of them riding on a passing train slammed by the waves. Much of the wreckage is still here, but most has been shoveled into piles, and the sound of hammering and the smell of freshly sawn timber are constant reminders that the village is rebuilding.

Things look better for Sriyawathi too, at least outwardly. The ruins of her house, reduced to little more than a few badly cracked walls, have been cleaned up, and a plastic tarp has been strung over the front room so the family could open a small grocery store there, selling bananas and onions and Elephant-brand ginger beer. She and her husband sleep in the shelter, really little more than a shed, built by Danish aid workers in the meticulously swept dirt backyard.

But in the quiet of that home, it's clear that Sriyawathi is fighting, and sometimes losing, a war with her own grief.

"She's having a difficult time holding together," said her 23-year-old daughter Sujeewa . "I'm really frightened."

Pradeep was 19 years old, the baby of the family and his mother's late-in-life only son. At the time of his death, he had recently started a job as an insurance salesman and was preparing to take the university entrance exams for a second time, hoping for a better score.

It was what his mother, a fiercely determined woman, wanted. She had spent years saving a few rupees at a time from her husband's pay selling vegetables and her small income from sewing clothing. With that money, she educated the children and built the house. She was the center of the family's life. She made the decisions, she made the rules, she set the tone of relentless middle-class aspiration.

But Pradeep was the center of her life, and his loss has all but shattered her.

She hasn't had a complete meal in weeks, and her two daughters hide pictures of their dead brother, afraid of bringing her to tears. She takes little interest in the rebuilding of her house, set along a sandy dirt road that cuts through the middle of the village.

The strong, independent woman is buckling under the weight of her own independence.

Across Indonesia , Sri Lanka and India , millions of tsunami survivors are struggling to rebuild their splintered lives. Most have found ways to keep going: building new homes, holding together broken families, caring for neighbors and friends, going through the bureaucratic tedium of requesting government assistance.

But for some, the burden of loss has been too heavy.

Some effects are obvious: excessive drinking, domestic violence, habitual gambling. But sometimes the signs are more oblique. If Sriyawathi is outwardly getting by, with her little shop and her cleaned-up house, she and her husband, Punyasiri , a silent man weakened by a stroke two years ago, are suffering terribly. When she cries in the night, he begins to cry with her. Their daughters worry the unrelenting grief will make them both sick.

In the United States , people would look at Sriyawathi's situation and might talk about the stages of grief, and the depression she appears to be battling. Therapy could be suggested, or anti-depressant medication.

Here, most mental health professionals prefer a different approach. In a country with strong community support systems, and less emphasis on individualism, families and neighbors are often better help, they say.

"We don't have a tradition of counselors here," said Dr. Palitha Abeykoon , an adviser to the World Health Organization in Colombo , the capital. Without community support, "Even if the whole country is flooded with psychiatrists it's not going to help."

But Sriyawathi has little such support. Her independence and drive, the qualities that helped her take her family from near-destitution to Sri Lanka's lower middle class, has left her isolated. It's not that she's unfriendly - she's a warm, motherly woman who cares deeply for the people around her. But she was also intensely single-minded about bettering her family's life.

In a village where sharing is a constant - wandering into someone else's house to borrow a cup of rice or a handful of spices is common - she kept mostly to herself. She despises asking for help. As a result, she has few close friends.

"My family always kept our privacy," she says simply. "I don't want to depend on anyone, not even my daughters."

At a critical time, that has become a weakness.

A few weeks after the tsunami, she and her husband left her elder daughter's large house, a few minutes' walk away, where they'd been staying and moved into the temporary shelter behind their own destroyed home. It's where she belongs, she says, the place she built and where she raised her children. Most important, it's where her son grew up, even if she hates to walk past what remains of his bedroom.

"This is my house. I can't cry the way I want at someone else's house," she said.

But if Sriyawathi can appear very fragile, some of her strength remains. When she needs to, she can sometimes break through her grief.

She managed to set up the shop, for instance, and still carries much responsibility for her family: encouraging Sujeewa to apply to nursing school, taking care of her infant granddaughter and cooking many of the meals.

She speaks sadly of the village men who have come to depend on handouts.

"Now they don't have to work, so they just get drunk and sit around," she said. "But I don't want to do that. If everyone did that the country would fall apart."

She's also not really as alone as she thinks. When the neighbors heard her crying long into the night, some spoke to Sujeewa , who was living at her sister's.

"They came and told me I should stay" with her parents, Sujeewa said, fighting tears.

Many of the family's burdens now rest on this cheerful young woman who loves horror movies and can't understand how people could be drawn to city life, which she has seen on a couple visits to Colombo, a three-hour drive to the north. "When you smile, they don't smile back," she said, stunned.

Now, it's she who keeps track of the family's important papers - a photo of Pradeep's corpse, her application for nursing school - in a child's plastic bookbag decorated with smiling panda bears.

"I have to look out for them," she said quietly, looking to make sure her mother wasn't listening. "It's better for them when I am here."

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A mother's story from the north

Mother mourns six children

By Simon Gardner

VATHARAYAN, Sri Lanka (Reuters)

It has been three months since Sri Lankan housewife Viyarseeli Nadarajahlingam saw her six children swallowed up by Asia's tsunami, but crumpled in grief at a makeshift shrine, she often longs for death.

"I used to call you my little ones. Now I have no one!" she wailed on a daily visit to the bare concrete foundations of her former seaside home, razed to the ground in this tiny fishing village turned ghost town deep in territory held by Tamil Tiger rebels.

"When will I see you again?" she screamed desperately in her native Tamil, her hands raised in supplication and cries piercing an otherwise eerie calm as palm leaves swished in the wind and waves lapped ashore nearby.

Nadarajahlingam looked on in disbelief as a towering tsunami wave eclipsed the tops of surrounding coconut palms and wrenched her children -- the youngest a year old, the oldest 13 -- from her arms.

She watched one son drown, tangled in fishing nets like the ones she and her husband depend on for a living. She buried four of her children in a sandy graveyard for tsunami victims nearby. The remains of two others were never found.

Nadarajahlingam was disconsolate when Reuters visited her in the days following the tsunami at a school where she and her fisherman husband Sinnathuraoused along with 4,000 other displaced.

"I wish that my husband and I would die soon," she wept at the time.

ONE STEP AT A TIME

The couple have now resettled in their native village, though further inland, and live in a tent made from plastic sheeting in the shade of a palm tree. They are waiting for one of hundreds of temporary homes being built from zinc sheets and concrete.

They have little in the way of possessions. A few plastic cups and bowls, a mirror and a ceremonial oil lamp burning in front of a collage of pictures of their children.

The dream of returning to a home like the one they lost is likely years off, and the 31-year-old is plagued by the shadow of death looming over her. She has already tried to kill herself once, and continues to have dark thoughts.

"I cry all day," she said, sitting in her stiflingly hot tent, coughing violently.

"When I am alone, I always think about death. But death t death won't come instantly," she said. "One day I took 15 Panadols . Then they took me to hospital."

Nadarajahlingam is not alone. December's tsunami killed around 40,000 people along Sri Lanka 's southern, eastern and northern shores, tearing thousands of families apart.

The bulk of the dead were women and children -- husbands lost young brides and around 4,000 children lost one or both parents.

Others are making visible progress.

Seamstress Srishanthini Vetharniyam and her family have now left a tiny hut they wove from palm fronds after the tsunami and have repaired their home, which is just outside a 500 metre coastal buffer zone the Tamil Tigers have imposed.

They have laid a new roof, and are making new fishing nets. A head-high watermark on the grubby walls is a constant reminder.

STILL HAUNTED

"Even now I have fear," the 20-year-old said, describing how she and her neighbours ran for their lives the previous night after the latest repeat tsunami scare.

"But I need to get back to a job. I don't have sewing machines," she said. "They give us stamps for food. We eat with that."

The government says around 100,000 people are living in tents and shelters, while over 400,000 others are living with friends and relatives, most relying on handouts of dry rations.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) humanitarian arm says government food relief is getting through, but the rebels want a bigger share of aid and senior rebels are in Europe lobbying for international support.

Even before the tsunami struck, Nadarajahlingam had already been displaced four times by the Tigers' two-decade war for separation in the north and east.

In some places, the scars of war and the tsunami have become one. Remnants of walls torn down by waves are pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel from shells fired before a 2002 ceasefire plunged a civil warhat killed over 64,000 people into limbo.

"When shells came onto us, I used to keep the children on the ground, lie over them and save them," she said.

Nadarajahlingam longs for more babies. But in a cruel twist of fate, she had a hysterectomy last year to focus on bringing up her three boys and three girls.

"It is only one year since I had my womb removed. If you can help me to have my womb again, and make me have children, I will bring them up," she pleaded.

"Otherwise we'll simply die."

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