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"Tsunami Doctor" left Sri Lanka with a bad taste in his mouth!
By Carl Muller
Dr. Thomas Carlin was holidaying in Unawatuna when the tsunami struck. His was an ugly story - good in parts - when I met him in Kandy. Burly, bald and bristling with energy, Carlin is one of the "fighting Irish" who has seen the world and is repelled by much of it. Yet in Unawatuna, where he was in December, he had to think fast.

When the sea came in, he swept his documents into a plastic folder, zipped it up and leaped for a mattress that was whipped off his bed. He was propelled out of his hotel room, shot through a window, rode the rushing water as best he could and was dumped unceremoniously into a thicket that, he swore, smelt like bad prune juice. He ran as best he could when the second wave bore in. "It was a post-nuclear landscape," he said. “The two waves - the second was bigger - stunned us with the magnitude of their impact. Not one stone stood on another. I was looking at utter desolation, isolation. No communications, no roads, telephone or electricity posts, jumbles of torn wires.. everything wiped out. I thought, my God, are we the only ones left? Is this happening all over the world?"

Many of those who survived took to the high compound of the Rock House; and that hotel complex quickly became an emergency centre. Dr. Carlin set to work. He mustered many who helped. They salvaged what medicines there were and as much medical materials available. Men and women worked feverishly, even tearing up sarongs and saris into strips to serve as bandages.

"I sent out teams of men and organised a search for water and whatever food there was. Clothes and shoes were collected and a lot of tinned foods that had been thrown forcefully out of hotels and homes. Men raked through the debris, collecting whatever they thought necessary."

Carlin's greatest task was the search for and collection of the dead. A makeshift mortuary was demarcated in a cleared area and the dead kept being brought in. He was remorseless in his task but, as he said, so many survivors, some just dragging themselves, many shivering in the shock of it all, looking aimlessly at the destruction around them, rallied. "I never saw such courage," he said. "None thought themselves to be victims. They were all survivors and their will was to see that others also survived, to drag them as best they could from death's door."

Carlin was given a name by the hundreds who teamed up under him. Tsunami Doctor, they said, and it inspired them to follow him and do all they could. "Within 12 hours the dead had begun to decompose," he said, “and I had to get pits dug that would be mass graves. Every corpse was photographed for later identification. We buried 173 that day - among them 11 foreigners - and the people worked with a will. It took between 36 and 48 hours for the helicopters to come in. Pilots told me they had been ordered out by the British High Commission to evacuate injured foreign nationals. That operation went on for up to 84 hours. I said I would make my own way back and they agreed that, being a doctor, I should remain."

On the third day, Dr. Carlin stopped his teams from going out in search of the dead. "Decomposition would have been dangerously advanced by then. There were no masks or gloves. Recovering any more bodies needed specialist equipment. Everyone around came to regard the place I worked in as a crisis centre. Over 400 were treated, some with terrible lesions. It had to be a patch-up job on many, but they could survive long enough to be taken to a hospital."

Dr. Carlin said he was stunned at the manner in which the people rallied. "We organised ourselves. They dragged through the debris, finding whatever could be used. Many ran inland to homes from where they brought food, water and more people to help. Every man and woman made me shiver with a special kind of excitement. None of them had any thought of self." He quickly rallied the staff of the hotels to help. He mentioned names: Marcus, Anil Dias and Asoka Wickremasinghe of Rock House; Malli of Shangri La; Dan and Simona of Secret Garden.

Today, these hotel staff still shake their heads and tell of the Tsunami Doctor. Ask them today and they will tell you that his was the only success story in those first bitter sea-drenched days. Dr. Carlin had much more he could have said, but all he wanted to convey was the incredible will and power of those who worked with him. It is, he said, "a story of survival with dignity and selflessness in the face of total catastrophe. I call it little miracle!"

And then things turned sour. With no protest, he watched NGOs and government teams move in. He was told that his services would no longer be required. He watched men come in, armed with stacks of notices stuck on poles to say that this was a disaster area and declared a 100-metre buffer zone. "While people were starving, dying, rotting, while children were missing in their hundreds, the government was apparently busy printing no occupation notices," he said wryly. "Oh, there was such a show of concern and sympathy. All sorts of Very Important Parasites came in with their bureaucratic drums and self-serving cymbals.

“I was shocked to see how quickly corruption began to blossom. Those who had worked so well with me were utterly demoralised. It was if their true natures had become stunted. I saw things that, to me, were unbelievable. I saw cash aid being given to sturdy men who suddenly began to shout out that they were fisherman and had lost their boats and fishing tackle. Many of them were outsiders from the interior who had rushed to the scene to take advantage of the stricken people's miseries. I knew they could not be fisherman.

“I watched women lining up for food parcels, then go to the rear of the queue where knots of men hovered, give the parcels to them and rejoin the queues. I saw the small stock of medicines I had so painfully collected, being taken away and many of the injured told to go to hospital. It was unbelievable.

The vultures were feeding the vultures! What was happening was unbelievable. Packets of tea and milk food and pulses were given to people who had no way to prepare the milk or cook the grain. What they needed was a sheltered camp, something to cover themselves with, a field kitchen and cooked hot meals.

"I saw nothing to tell me of genuine concern for the terrible condition of the living, let alone the dead. Worst of all, I saw flocks of debris combers, carry away everything they thought would be serviceable. These buzzards moved in well-organized gangs. Much furniture was dragged away and they thought nothing of turning over the bodies they came upon, filling their pockets with gold chains, earnings, anything of value. Sometimes they even fought over a necklace or chain. So much had been swept away from the hotels and guest houses. All this was carried away just as swiftly."

Dr. Carlin went to Colombo, then came to Kandy. "I saw thousands of good people, rushing to the aid collection centres, giving all they could. Families went, even the children carrying what they could. So much goodness.. and yet I learn of thousands huddled in the rain, no one to give them a kind word or a helping hand.

“From Colombo I contacted so many people and organisations in my country and elsewhere. I urged them to keep sending aid but also to make sure it reached the temples and churches. The Buddhist temples in the south took special care of the suffering, fed and sheltered them.

The saffron robe was as beacon of hope to thousands. I am not afraid to call the big bluffs that now go on, perpetrated on thousands of sufferers by these "official" organisations and by stooges and thieves. Here in Kandy I see Swedish shoes, bags and bags of clothes being sold. It is so obvious that all these are aid donations. I saw shops in Colombo selling Australian canned fish. How did all this aid fall into the hands of traders?

Dr. Carlin was in Kandy until he left for the airport. "Just for my own need to see how things have fared, I intend to return in six months," he said. "I will spearhead more help from as many countries as I can - and you can be the sure the world will listen to all I have to say!"

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