I arrive in Sri Lanka thinking of New Orleans under water, bloated corpses floating in foul water, a paralyzed government, and angry survivors. Sri Lanka quickly reminds me that it lived through much worse after the Tsunami struck on December 26 last year.

As we head out of Colombo airport, 26 year-old Ranga, my taxi driver, tells me how he was taking two Italian tourists to the southern beaches when he drove into the Tsunami. He remembers driving past a train and pointing it out to his passengers. Next moment he was heading straight at a wall of water. He veered off the road and drove inland as fast as he could. He managed to outrace the wave for a kilometer, but came to a lagoon. The three jumped out of the car, and were swept away.

Ranga clung to a coconut tree, but lost his balance and fell. The water was moving with such force that it stripped away his clothes. Dodging bodies and trees, he managed to land on a roof where a family of three had found refuge. After 30 minutes or perching perilously on the roof, he swam to a temple.

“Only my life escaped,” says Ranga as he brings out a photo of his crushed taxi. He dislocated a hand, and was so traumatized that he couldn’t leave home for a month. Still, he was luckier than many. Over 30,000 Sri Lankans lost their lives, including almost all of those who were traveling in the train that Ranga passed. Its broken carriages still lie beside the track near the resort of Hikkaduwa, a symbol of the disaster.

Photo credit: Asian Disaster Reduction Center
A mangled train in Hikkaduwa after theSri Lankan Tsunami.

Ranga was glued to his television when Hurricane Katrina struck the US, and Sri Lankans generally have been comparing the two calamities. Many have concluded that Americans managed better. Ranga was impressed by the accuracy of the weather forecasts in the US, which at least gave the people of Louisiana some advance warning. The worst thing about the Tsunami, he says, was the surprise.

One journalist writing in the Sunday Island is struck by the different reaction from Sri Lankans and Americans. “We in Sri Lanka take misfortune in our stride,” he writes. “Karma, we say. That is life. But in the US they are incapable of coming to terms with loss and deprivation. They tend to blame the government more than we do.”

“(In the US) there are more people in civil society to take up the cry. Our protests came mostly from those affected, who form no lobby and can muster a couple of hundred votes.”

Were Sri Lankans really so resigned to their fate that they accepted the loss of 30,000 lives? This is hard to believe. But the writer’s other conclusion seems more plausible. He contrasts the fury of Americans towards their government with the lethargic response of Sri Lankans. It all came down to civil society: “(In the US) there are more people in civil society to take up the cry. Our protests came mostly from those affected, who form no lobby and can muster a couple of hundred votes.”

These two disasters shared one important characteristic. Even with the advance warning, many of the poor in New Orleans lacked the means to escape from the floods. The same has been true of Sri Lanka. Many of those who died in the Tsunami had been forced to move to low-lying lands by years of war. The poor are always the first to suffer.

Natural disasters are rarely natural.