Overlooked tsunami victims: the elderly

After the tsunami, HelpAge has distributed aid packs through the eldest member of each family. The kits contain "senior-sensitive" items including medicines, vitamins, and lotions as well as water, sleeping mats, sheets, sarongs, mosquito netting, candles, new clothes, and matches. In Sri Lanka, HelpAge (helpage.org) has brought aid to Galle, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, and small islands. In numerous interviews, the need for bicycles became clear, since many older people use them to get around.

Some 31,000 people perished in Sri Lanka, according to government estimates. Since 40 percent of the population is under age 19, the elderly, who are thought to have died in numbers similar to children, got hard hit proportionally. Still, no agency or government has any hard numbers yet. Such a tally may never be known, according to Nimal Ranatunga of HelpAge.

But visits along the coast suggest that the wave was a tragedy for seniors. In Narigama area, says an elderly fishmonger, 16 older people were killed, and two children. Among some 400 mostly young females at a factory in Kosgoda, no children were lost, but six grandparents were.

"Mostly in this area it was elderly who died, and some children, of course," says Bodhisumana Thero, a chief monk at the Kumara Maha Viharaya temple in the southwest. "The problem for our elderly was the speed of the water. The water came too quickly."

Survivors tell a basic story about seniors from Dec. 26: At the de Silva household in Kosgoda, husband and wife fled with the two kids, and sheepishly report, in front of the grandmother, that they forgot her. Grandmother de Silva says, "I survived by holding onto a pillar in the house. I am glad the house did not fall down."

In Narigama, K.R. Gity and her brother began carrying the 82-year-old senior Gity after the first wave. But the second came with too much force, and she was ripped from their arms.

The character of the tsunami itself was significant, some older survivors said. One said it was not a wave at all, but a "creature" - a wall of water that swirled and eddied and carried within it debris, like heavy chunks of conch, that made it dangerous, especially for those less nimble.

Yet elders were also resourceful. Some tell of finding exactly the right spot to be in. A fisherman in Amalangoda survived by sitting in a window frame placed diagonally to the ocean.

J. K. Jeselin, who is 88 years old and whose family of nine now lacks a house with a roof and windows, doesn't seem overly bothered to be at the Beautiful Temple. She is interested in everything happening around her. She had no TV or electricity before, so does not miss them now. She says that "a foreigner saved me" on Dec. 26, but doesn't know any more about the man.

Mainly, Ms. Jeselin is worried about another tsunami. But, as she puts it in the grandest tradition of the matriarch, "I'm not worried about it for myself; I am worried about my grandchildren."

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