“ I was 4 months pregnant and I was craving curries so I went into town in Sri Lanka. I was there when the tsunami hit in 2004. I wasn’t in the house, My brother in law took me to town for my doctors appointment when the waves came. The doctor told me to get some vitamin tablets so I went to the Chemist. I saw people running everywhere and the traffic was going in all directions trying to get out of town. The town is only 100 metres from the beach so that town was badly damaged. My doctor survived when the waves hit but a Nurse and his Receptionist died as did some of the pregnant women in the waiting room. I found the same doctor again later and he told me he survived by holding himself up from the ceiling hook.
We didn’t know anything about tsunamis, we didn’t even know what they were called before that. The Chemist hadn’t opened as we a bit early. We waited and I got my vitamins, we headed home on a motor bike on our normal route and I couldn’t get to my house. The water was everywhere and we just kept going inland. We couldn’t get to the house and people were saying the sea is coming. They didn’t know what was going on. This British friend said there was earthquake in the ocean and he explained what had happened. I wasn’t able to return home because of the flooding and the damage so we had to wait for things to calm down. It was so terrifying. My mother, my sister and her child survived by running upstairs. If there wasn’t an upstairs they would have washed away. Our neighbours house was flat. We had no water, no power. It was so devastating, rubble, debris and dirty water everywhere. My town Kadabeddagama was very lucky as we were a fishing town so the fishermen saved many people. No-one was lost in our town.
The ocean went out and it went dry, some parts normally deep went dry. People rushed toward the beach to see what was happening as fish were flapping everywhere on dry land. Then the waves came. That’s how over 35,000 people died in Sri Lanka alone and still people are missing. If it wasn’t for my doctor’s appointment I would have gone too. My house was on the beach and normally at that time I would have been sitting out the back watching the surf because we have a surf break there. I lost everything I owned in the house including all my photos and we had to rebuild the bottom level so you can say I’m a tsunami survivor. We moved to Australia in 1997 and I’ve lived in the Northern Rivers since 2003.”