Return is mission of mercy

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka - The line of sick and injured tsunami victims snakes through the refugee camp’s makeshift clinic and up to Dr. Joseph Angelo, who has traveled from Bel Air, Md., to treat his native countrymen.

“This area is totally neglected,” says Dr. Angelo, 44, who fled Sri Lanka in 1983 after war erupted between the island nation’s Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic groups.

“It is so pathetic. The health care is so primitive. No medications,” says Dr. Angelo, a Tamil, as he examines patients at a long wooden picnic table. “I have to do something for this community.”

The table is half-covered with bottles and boxes of medicine that have not been used in the United States for years.

Dr. Angelo sees the seemingly endless parade of patients in quick succession: A 47-year-old man with a fever from a possible case of meningitis; a 2-year-old boy with multiple hernias who could die without surgery, but has gone untreated for a year; a 24-year-old woman with fever and chills from a viral infection.

Their maladies are as much a product of scarce health care in Sri Lanka’s war-torn northern provinces as they are the result of the Dec. 26 tsunami, though the natural disaster has exacerbated the region’s refugee crisis and further taxed its overburdened hospital system.

The tsunami forced many Sri Lankans to abandon entire towns within a land mass that is slightly larger than West Virginia and located off the southern tip of India. Sri Lanka’s tsunami death toll is estimated at more than 30,900. About 225,000 in all may have perished in the tidal waves, most in Indonesia.

Many of Dr. Angelo’s clinic patients at Vidyananda College, a rural school housing 1,451 refugees, came from the nearby town of Kalapadu. The giant waves crashed through homes, leveled the church and reduced the once-prosperous fishing village to mounds of rubble scattered along the seashore.

As the doctor examines a rash on a 12-year-old boy’s foot — probably the result of walking in dirty water in the tsunami’s aftermath — the boy’s mother tells through an interpreter how they escaped, but lost their home and possessions.

“My son was swept away and clung to a tree,” says Jegatheeswary, 36, who, like many other Sri Lankans, uses only one name. “I grabbed my daughter and ran away. When I came back for my son, he was naked — everything was washed away.”

A divided nation

In Sri Lanka, the tidal waves left more than 200,000 homeless. Nearly two-thirds of the dead and 75 percent of the displaced families were Tamils living in territory controlled or influenced by the separatist Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTT).

The Sinhalese control the Sri Lankan government, but the Tigers control much of the northern provinces. The United States lists the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist group.

Though few condone the Tigers’ trademark suicide-bomb attacks, many Tamil expatriates in America and throughout the world support the struggle against what they see as discriminatory policies of the Sri Lankan government.

Story Continues →