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Parents waiting for waves to return kids
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-01-03 08:58
As dawn breaks over Sri Lanka's coast, dozens of parents come to the beach
where huge waves seized their children a week ago. "They believe their kids are
alive and the sea will return them — one day," UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy said
on Sunday, after touring this island country's tsunami-devastated shore.
A young Indian
tsunami victim cries while his mother shouts to make her way to reach the
back of a truck from where relief goods are being distributed at an aid
center in Cuddalore, some 185 kms of Madras.
[AFP] |
Children accounted for a staggering 40
percent, or 12,000, of Sri Lanka's death total of 30,000, officials said. But
without bodies to mourn over, many parents find it hard to believe their
children are dead. Some children were buried in mass graves, before parents were
told. Many were swept out to sea. Others may still await discovery in some of
the island's 800 refugee centers.
Day after day since the tsunami struck Dec. 26, parents come at dawn and
wander the beach in the devastated districts of Ampara and Batticaloa.
"They don't talk to anyone. They stay for an hour or two and then go back,"
said N. Wijewickrema, the Batticaloa police superintendent. "They return the
next day," he told Bellamy.
On Sunday, a few couples walked slowly along the beach. Other people walked
alone. Sometimes they knelt down to check a slipper or shoe washed ashore.
"I have never seen such a tragedy like this," Bellamy said, as surviving
parents awaited a miracle. "They don't want to accept their children are dead."
Some parents, who lost all their children, reportedly have taken orphans from
refugee centers to raise as their own before the authorities were able to place
the children with extended family members.
Aware of the problem, UNICEF's Sri Lanka chief Ted Chaiban said the agency
and local child care groups would establish a national program to match orphaned
children, without anyone else to care for them, with grieving parents.
"The first priority for children who are separated or unaccompanied is for
them to stay with their extended family or relatives," said Chaiban,
accompanying Bellamy on a helicopter tour of stricken areas. "We welcome efforts
by individuals and institutions to assist unaccompanied and separated children,
and request that they inform the authorities."
The Save the Children organization spokeswoman, Maleec Calyanaratne, said
that the families were trying to grapple with their grief — but that "this is
not the way to go about it." Unofficial adoptions will only lead to long-term
problems, she said.
Grim as Bellamy's tour was, there were signs of live returning to normal as
children skipped ropes, provided by UNICEF, at a 100-year-old Hindu temple in
Batticaloa.
"We are going to make sure they stay alive, and we want to make sure that
they have a future," Bellamy said.
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