Goodwill Is Alive and Well After Disaster

For years, this bohemian beach town on scenic Arugam Bay was a colorful stamping ground for surfing fanatics, backpackers and pot-smoking Rastafarians in dreadlocks and Bob Marley T-shirts. They drank at bars alongside local fishermen and rice farmers.

About 60 thatch-roofed resorts and eateries such as the Aloha, Hang Loose Hotel and Cool Spot restaurant -- run mostly by Sri Lankans -- lined a busy thoroughfare where motorcycles buzzed past ox carts appearing like holdovers from another time.

Then the tsunami struck, turning this hip little resort into a rubble-strewn wasteland.

More than 1,000 of the village’s 6,000 residents are dead, along with many tourists, their bodies washed ashore along a crescent-shaped beach. A thousand residents are missing -- “taken by the sea,” as the locals say.

Only three hotels remain.

The Ali, Mermaid’s Village, Dean’s Place and Rustling Palms, all gone. The same fate befell the Galaxy, the Beach Hut and the Tsunami Hotel.

The ghostly ruins of the Stardust have been left to sink into the sand. Its owner, a Dane named Peer Goodman, drowned in the rush of water. His body was found floating in a lagoon and was buried near the remains of his hotel.

Amid the adversity that would drive away some less determined entrepreneurs, the few hotel owners whose buildings survived have become the town’s ambassadors of goodwill.

Places such as the Hideaway, a grand turn-of-the-century house surrounded by several thatched cabanas, have turned themselves into free-of-charge headquarters for foreign doctors and relief workers, journalists and Sri Lankan military men.

Down the road at the Siam View Hotel, the French Red Cross has set up a clinic and pharmacy at the site of a former Internet cafe, where each night at the second-floor bar, beers are tapped from warm kegs and relief workers, reporters and others anxiously keep up with the developments of the international relief effort on cable TV.

The menu at the Siam View once warned against weapons, fighting, racists and putting one’s feet on the table. Now the place swarms with green-fatigued Sri Lankan special forces troops who are here as part of the rebuilding effort, many with loaded semiautomatic weapons at the ready.

As the relief workers and physicians arrive from around the globe, those Sri Lankans who have the means to do so -- natives as well as transplants -- have made the newcomers feel welcome.

At the Hideaway, which has seen its share of damage, two cabanas and acres of gardens were lost to the rush of water. The waves washed up on the grand front porch of the stately old main house, turning the once-secluded resort into beachfront property.

Now electricity is scarce and owner Vernon Tissera can afford to run his generator for only a few hours each day. He frowns a lot these days, concerned about the future of the hotel his family has run since 1978.

But rather than gouge visitors, the Hideaway has thrown away the bill. Three times a day, a local chef working for the Tisseras serves up spicy Sri Lankan delicacies and gourmet meals to people who are little more than strangers. The ingredients -- fish, chicken and eggs -- are shipped in from the faraway capital, Colombo, at considerable expense.

The hotel’s Toyota Land Cruiser is one of the few remaining privately owned vehicles in this town, which was separated from the mainland and its sister village of Pottuvil when the bridge that spanned the lagoon near the old cricket field was ripped in half.

Now the vehicle has become a makeshift taxi, and Tissera, his two sons and grandson ferry relief workers and supplies to and from the beachhead where fishing boats provide service to the mainland a short ride away. The Tisseras have enlisted a dozen villagers, homeless and unemployed after the tsunami, to help put the hotel back together.

“We need to help people -- you can’t be material-minded,” said Marlene Tissera, Vernon’s wife. “People are here to help Sri Lankans. We’re trying to give a little something back.”

Relief workers say such hospitality makes a difficult job more doable.

“It makes it a pleasure to do this,” said Mark Stinson, a San Francisco-area doctor working with Relief International who is a guest at the Hideaway. “And it makes me want to come back.”

At the Siam View Hotel, which is playing host to the French Red Cross, agency nurse Jean-Michel Pin likens owner Manfred Netzband-Miller to Mother Teresa.

“Without him, we’d be living in tents, or worse,” Pin said.

Still, Marlene Tissera has a hard time fathoming how the waves that once drew so many tourists here have transformed the tropical paradise.

“We’re just shattered, all of us,” she said, sitting on the porch of her hotel, sipping afternoon tea. “It doesn’t seem possible that a wave, a steady pounding of water, could have done all this -- take away people and houses and wash away roads.”

When she talks about the destructive wall of water, Angela Mitchell’s eyes widen.

Just before 9 a.m. Dec. 26, the Hideaway manager recalls, she heard people shouting: “The sea is coming! The sea is coming!” And the tourists and villagers came too, in droves, fleeing the oncoming wave.

More than 100 stood on the roof of the old hotel.

Mitchell, a 54-year-old native with an easy smile, moved the crowd and several vehicles behind the building for more protection. Her plan worked: No one at the Hideaway was killed.

But that couldn’t be said for the rest of Ulle. Mitchell spoke softly of the people who vanished or whose bodies washed up at the beach. So many villagers are gone, she said, including Tilika, the friendly coconut picker who came to the hotel each day to pick fruit for the guests.

There is emotional damage as well. One of Sri Lanka’s most picturesque beaches is now deserted because many people fear they will still encounter a washed-up body. Others say they are just not ready to return to the water’s edge.

These days, Arugam Bay is left to the stray dogs and the homeless families who have nowhere else to pitch their tents.

Neither the resort town, located near a bird sanctuary, nor Elephant Rock, where wild animals could often be seen grazing, resembles any kind of attraction any more. The road through town has been turned to rubble. Fires burn constantly as people clear away the wreckage of their former residences.

Hotel owners such as Vernon Tissera promise to rebuild both their own land and the town.

Down at the Siam View, owner Netzband-Miller embodies the keep-on-partying spirit of the old Ulle. He invites relief workers for free beer each night.

He remembers the moment the tsunami struck, how he decided he would not let the wave break him. He stood on the roof of an adjacent building with friends, drinking gin and tonic on a bright Sunday morning, watching the waves pound the hotel he has owned for 28 years.

“It was a bit of a party, but a black one at that,” he said. “When it was over, and the damage was done, I turned my back on it and said, ‘All right then, we’ll just have to start over.’ ”