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Sri
Lanka Journal:
Entry Number 3
Sri Lanka, Saturday, June 25, 2005
We
stayed at the Unawatuna Beach Resort, a locally owned place right
on the Indian Ocean. It was under 15 feet of water at the time of the
tsunami and things are still being rewired and repaired. Several times
the power would go off in the middle of the evening meal in the open
air platform which served as the dining room. The staff there was
wonderful and gave us a great rate which included our meals. We decided
not to move around and stay there throughout the entire trip except
when we arrived and returned through Colombo. I thought the place
(Unawatuna) was named as it was due to the plentiful tuna fish which
was constantly being caught in the shallows of the ocean. However, the
history of this place is much more complex and even symbolic than my
simple assumption that English language usage is somehow attached to
everything in the world.
The legendary part of the Unawatuna story is associated with how it
derived that name. This is where we have to turn back the pages of time
to the 2,000 year old Sanskrit epic "Ramayana" and the story of Rama
and Sita and the Demon King Ravana who kidnaped Sita and brought her to
his stronghold in Lanka. Rama, aided by his ally, Hanuman, waged war on
Ravana to regain Sita. In the course of that war Rama's brother
Lakshman was seriously wounded. The only herbs available to cure him
were located on the Himalayan mountains in north India.
Rama asked Hanuman to go there and bring the necessary herbs. Hanuman
complied but was unable to identify the desired herbs. In desperation
he grabbed a whole chunk of the mountain and brought it back to Lanka,
dropping a piece off on the southern tip. This place came to be called
"Onna-wetuna", which in Sinhalese means "there it fell", and gave rise
to the place name Unawatuna. The piece that dropped off is known as
Rhumassala-kanda, a hill which looks quite out of place on the natural
flat landscape of that region. It is coincidentally, a natural pharmacy
of medicinal herbs.
Actually, something did fall there in prehistoric times, not on the
land but 100 km away from Unawatuna in the sea. It has caused a huge
deep pit. Sir Arthur Clarke in one of his books stated that whatever
fell is still there disturbing the gravitational field of the earth. It
is labeled Terran Gravitic Anomaly I, 110 meters below the zero
reference on the Goddard Space Flight Centre's 3-D map of the Earth's
Gravimetric Geoid.
Lahiru took Brian, Betty and I up this precipice of Rhumassala-kanda -
with its expansive view of the Galle Fort harbor. On the top there is a
large and recently built Cha-ithya which is one of those large white
cone shaped structures found at all the Buddhist Temples in Sri Lanka.
There was also a large polychromed statue of the monkey god Hanuman
holding a clump of earth in his left hand as though he was about to
serve it as a meal. The name of the temple is the Peace Temple and the
four elevations held statues of the Buddha at various points in his
life. Lahiru prayed at one of the little altars set up there. He said
that a number of people came there at the time of the tsunami to see
what was happening.
Having learned that the area where we were staying was named after a
massive piece of land falling from the hand of a flying monkey deity
and also finding out about the actual meteorite or whatever it was
which formed the great oceanic crater eons ago, I had a deep sense of
awe about the sacred nature of the place and the almost historic fact
that the tsunami was one of a number of large earth shaking events,
mythological and actual which affected this place. Like the Terran
Gravitic Anomaly I which affecta gravity throughout the world, the
tsunami drew me here just as certainly as gravity itself. Lahiru’s
praying brought us all in touch with the immense nature of the disaster
which brought us here and, for the first time, I began to realize that
my time in this obscure country off the southern coast of India was
part of a spiritual transformation which is going to be a part of the
rest of my life. Certainly, my work in New York since September 11,
2001 has had that effect. God somehow links the seemingly disparate
parts of our personal histories with larger purposes symbolized by
ancient mythology and modern tragedy.
In a way the very philosophical and almost accepting name of the place
itself ,"there it fell", bespeaks a people devout in faith, unique to
the place in which they live and ultimately able to reach out and find
history which gives continuity to immense events such as the tsunami. A
problem I realized I have had for much of my life has been looking at
the tragedies which befall other peoples such as the genocide in the
Sudan or the AIDS epidemic in all of Africa or the holocaust of Hitler
as being events somehow culturally and humanistically detached from me
and the world in which I have lived. Seeing refugees from these
cultures I always somehow thought that there was a certain cultural
stoicism which made processing the pain and loss easier for them. That
was, of course, nonsense and it has taken my experiences with the
refugees of Vietnam, the people of September 11 and the tsunami to
finally know I am at one with all humanity and it has always been that
way.
The humbling part of our work which is basically listening to the story
of disaster, loss and grief comes from the fact that we traveled here
to perform this when all along there is a cultural and religious motif
here which provides deep symbols for understanding the nature of these
things. But, of course, it usually takes a neutral outsider to give
people permission to open their broken hearts and shattered lives to
introspection and inspection which is somehow healing; somehow
empowering. And being able to be that vessel for another in which to
process the immensity of things is something which makes me simply awe
struck - a privilege and honor which I did not earn but cherish.
Charles Flood, D.Sc.
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