Leaf Light

The Story of the Chard

Twenty years ago this coming Boxing Day 2024, a monster earthquake provoked a Tsunami that devasted the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Waves 30 metres high (100 feet) killed over a quarter of a million people across 14 countries.

Awake for some reason in the small hours of December 26th, I watched it happening on television news, shocked into sobs. The response to the tragedy was almost as moving; millions of pounds in donations from across the world.

Three months later, I found myself in Hikkaduwa, on the south coast of Sri Lanka, helping a small group of volunteers organise activities for the displaced and orphaned children living in refugee camps. Puppeteer and magician Dragan Matijevic, a veteran of many such projects in the war-torn Yugoslavia of the ’90s, had been invited there by people on the ground and I went with him.

In the minibus, rumbling down the coast road from Columbo airport, we peered out into the dark to see uprooted gravestones, torn out like teeth by the sea, and scattered all over the cemetery. I wondered what I had got myself into.

At our accommodation, the heavy rains did little to dispell the dank in rooms so recently blasted through by the monster waves. The sadness reeked.

But the next day was a flurry of activity in tropical sunshine; volunteers from all over the world were building and re-building things, buying things and making things, and queuing for a turn on the dial-up modem in the only internet cafe/general store.

We worked in schools, in Buddhist monasteries, in shacks and makeshift shelters. The children made puppets and plays, wrote songs and rehearsed for shows. Creativity is good medicine for trauma.

Poignant images of that time include the day we led the children back to the sea. Having virtually grown up on the sandy margin between the Indian Ocean and the jungle, the tsunami had left them cowering as far inland as they could get. But we managed to make a festival procession of the event; the children made giant puppets of willow and tissue paper, illuminated with battery powered torches, and we sang our way to the beach for a celebratory feast of biscuits and juice.

The Ocean was as flat and quiet as milk in the sunset, glowing pink and orange like a tropical smoothie. Some children even took a dip.

Before we left that first time, we all did as much shopping as we could afford. Local businesses had been all but destroyed, and although they were rebuilding rapidly, they needed customers more than anything else. With my magpie eye for fabric, I was utterly seduced by the saris. I just couldn’t choose! Couldn’t pack enough. Couldn’t spread my custom wide enough.

The purple silk leaves in this picture are from the border of one sari I still have left in my fabric chest. The main length is the shade of the bloom on grapes, the colour of the last light on the sea as dusk sinks into dark. The border, marking a beginning as much as end, speaks more of the roses and violets of dawn, of fresh hope and the brightness impending.