Vanessa Gezari is a Foreign/National Correspondent for the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by The Poynter Institute. I e-mailed Vanessa and asked her to answer questions about her experience covering the tsunami, in return she wrote a personal account of her time reporting on the disaster.
She writes:
In scope, the tsunami was beyond any natural disaster that I or any other reporter had seen. Although I’ve worked in Afghanistan and other conflict areas, I had never seen as much concentrated death as I did in Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the three weeks after the wave. Reporters who have covered genocide in Africa and the Balkans will have seen mass graves like the ones we saw along the beach on the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka or near the roadsides in Banda Aceh. For obvious reasons, though, even reporters who have seen mass graves have generally not seen the dead actually being heaved into them, piled on top of each other like so much cord wood, the human need to identify them outstripped by the practical need to get them off the streets and under the ground.
Covering the tsunami, at least in the places we visited, was also among the most challenging logistical tasks I’ve ever faced. The areas it hit, particularly in Indonesia, were difficult to negotiate. In Sri Lanka, cell phones worked most places along the southern coast and in Jaffna, but not in much of the north and east. The tsunami damage was confined to the rim of the island: it was horrific from the sea inland about a kilometer at most.
It was a different story in Indonesia. The north Sumatran province of Aceh, hardest hit by the quake and the wave, has been cut off from the rest of the world by a government ban on journalists since martial law was imposed there in the spring of 2003. The province has been beset by a long-running conflict between the Indonesian Army and the Free Aceh separatist movement known as the GAM. The people are deeply observant Muslims — Aceh is the only province in Indonesia where Shari’a law is in force — who didn’t expend a lot of energy accommodating foreigners or tourists in the best of times, let alone after a giant wave washed away tens of thousands of their people.
Communications are so poor that journalists based in Jakarta didn’t begin to learn the extent of the damage in Aceh until 48 hours after the tsunami. A friend who works for a Western news agency in Jakarta told me it took them ages even to get through to businesses or public call centers there, and when they did the conversations were brief and obscure. “Everyone is dying here,” someone would say into the phone, and then the connection would be cut.
By the time we reached Banda Aceh, two weeks after the tsunami and after spending more than a week in Sri Lanka, things were beginning to improve, but communications were still terrible. Most cell phones didn’t work (text messaging was the most reliable way to communicate) although Internet access in town was superb, thanks to a wireless network set up in the governor’s compound to help journalists file their stories.
More importantly, sanitary conditions had deteriorated everywhere and the city was full of dead bodies.
The devastation was far worse than in Sri Lanka, eating into the coastline as much as five kilometers (about three miles) in some places and wiping out whole towns, acres of rice paddies, palm groves and stretches of sand and jungle. All the hotels in Banda Aceh were gone, and the government had set up a sort of refugee camp for reporters with one toilet that was said to be unusable. The best option, and the one most journalists chose, was to rent private houses or stay with families. We spent several nights with the family of a schoolteacher, renting one room in his two-bedroom house and using his outdoor bucket bath, where the water was pumped from a deep stone well.
When we traveled up the coast to Lamno, about seven hours from Banda Aceh by fishing boat, we stayed in a field hospital that was being set up by the Pakistani Army. During our second night, an old man died of a respiratory infection in the next room and his body lay there for 12 hours while a young woman sang the Koran over it. There was no working morgue and nowhere to refrigerate the corpse. No one would take the body out at night because there were rebels in the hills. A truckload of men came to collect it late the following morning. All things considered, we felt pretty lucky to have gotten a room in the hospital, which actually had beds. The alternative would have been sleeping in the mud in tent camps with the refugees, or in the schools where some of them lived.
We also had a good meal one night with the Pakistani doctors in Lamno — lentil dal, scrambled eggs, and flat brown bread cooked by the soldiers — our first substantial meal in days. Finding food and fresh water wasn’t easy, even if you had money.
The presence of death — particularly the sight and smell of bodies — was what affected me most while we were actually reporting this story, although the structural damage to houses and whole towns was also disturbing, not just to me, but to the people who lived there. What human beings mainly do — with the objects on their shelves, their books and dishes and small homemade shrines — is to organize the natural world. The tsunami did just the opposite, disordering and unmaking the lives people had carved out, often over decades, in lovely seaside places that were nonetheless somewhat inhospitable to human habitation. Some of the most moving things I saw were the objects the tsunami had left in its wake, objects removed from their contexts that spoke of the efforts people had made to stave off nature, to separate their interiors from the flourishing jungles and the whispering sea outside.
These things were strewn everywhere: shoes, pages from the Koran, a package of dry macaroni, an intact leather purse filled with soggy documents, children’s school drawings, an electric iron, a tube of lipstick. As for dead bodies, I don’t entirely believe people who say they aren’t affected by the sight of them, although I do believe some of my reporter friends who say they have seen so much death over the years that corpses no longer carry much emotional weight.
During our first day in Banda Aceh, we saw dozens of bodies in the first few hours — being thrown into the mass grave on the way in from the airport, lying in the rain on the pavement outside a hospital, waiting in half-zipped body bags near the side of the road by the old harbor, offering ghastly glimpses of bleached feet or blackened skin. We had seen bodies before, in Sri Lanka, where they were burying them without body bags, wrapped in scraps of cloth.
The thing that was different about Banda Aceh was the sheer amount of death, and the way its smell — and the feeling of it — were inescapable no matter where you went in town. Even worse, the longer we stayed there, the more we got used to it, to breathing it in the intersections, to keeping handkerchiefs around our necks and raising them whenever the smell became especially oppressive. After a day or two, we hardly noticed it anymore.
The presence of death is what affected me most while we were reporting the story, but I don’t think it’s what will haunt me. Dead bodies, after all, are just objects; as repellent as they are, they are no longer observing, suffering, enduring or doing any of the other things we associate with life. To me, the most affecting characters in this story were the ones who survived: parents who lost children, people whose families and villages were stripped away, who were deprived of everything that had given them meaning, believing people who lost their faith in God, and unbelievers who found God in the disaster.
It wasn’t difficult to talk to these people about what happened to them — indeed, many seemed eager to talk. Sometimes it was hard to get them to say what they were feeling. They knew what they had seen, and what they had seen seemed unbelievable, even to them. They could describe it, but the part of them that responded emotionally was somewhere else, inaccessible. Sometimes the most they could say was that it made them sad, and often they couldn’t even say that. That was a vast understatement anyway. Some said they wished they were dead. That seemed closer to the truth.
We met a woman who worked as a caretaker at a children’s home near the sea in Mullaitivu, in northeastern Sri Lanka. There had been about 154 children at the home, of whom some 36 survived. Eighteen bodies were found; the rest were missing. Malaty Senathirasa, the caretaker, had worked at the home for eight years. She cooked for and washed the children, played with them, put them to bed. On the day of the tsunami, she grabbed an 8-year-old boy and an infant girl. The water tore the baby from her hands, but she managed to save the boy. When we met her in a temporary shelter about a week and a half after the tsunami, where she was caring for the children who remained, Senathirasa had a look that I have only seen in people who have survived war. Her face and body were like shells encasing a soul that had shrunken and stood trembling in some interior place far from the surface.
That soul, or what was left of it, was visible in her eyes and the anxiety of her hands, which worried the skin of her arms incessantly. She carried her body like a burden. Her gestures — the way her pain was expressed in her body and in her voice — were indelible. She made dying seem easy.
If you are covering a crisis, or know someone who is, and would like to submit a personal account for posting on this blog, please contact me at ecarr@poynter.org. Please include your name, affiliation, title, and geographic location.
