Out of tragedy, fortune for Lankan tsunami village

As towering waves came crashing into the southern coast of Sri Lanka on December 26, 2004, Kushil Gunasekera gathered up his children and they ran for their lives to a nearby temple, the highest point they could find. Returning later to his village in Seenigama district, he found a heart-breaking scene of death and devastation: one in four had been killed by the Boxing Day tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean.

A decade on, Seenigama has risen from the ashes and is now a model of prosperity, thanks in large part to the efforts of Gunasekera who led a relief drive from the ruins of his ancestral home and later gave up his lucrative sugar business to devote himself to a charity he had founded in 1999.

Seenigama is an outlier, however, along the ravaged coastline. Tourists have returned to the palm-fringed beaches but livelihoods still hang by a thread in many villages that got scant assistance from the state.

More than 250,000 people died in the tsunami, which was triggered by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island.

Indonesia bore the brunt, but Sri Lanka was the next worst-affected country with a death toll of about 40,000.

Seenigama, about 110 km (70 miles) south of the island nation's capital, Colombo, was hit particularly hard by the tsunami because reefs that might have shielded it had been destroyed by years of coral mining. Years before the disaster, Gunasekera had started his Foundation of Goodness non-governmental organisation to generate alternative livelihoods for the coral miners. But the tsunami, which wrecked thousands of houses and schools, presented him with a much bigger challenge.

'Waves of compassion'
Seven photographs are propped up on a table in the front hall of D Karunawathi's house, a reminder of the family members she lost in the tsunami, including her mother, sister, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter. None of their bodies were found. "Yes, we lost lives," says 60-year-old Karunawathi from her robust two-storey house. "But we got a permanent home."

But Gunasekera's project went far beyond bricks and mortar. Leaning on his own charisma and connections, including some of Sri Lanka's best-known cricketers, Gunasekera brought together villagers, volunteers and donors, ploughing financial assistance into long-term projects to build a comprehensive and sustainable model of community development.

The project now provides free services for more than 25,000 people, ranging from healthcare to vocational training and a sports academy for the young that has already produced two national-level cricketers.