Aid workers who helped rebuild after the devastation of the Boxing Day tsunami reflect 20 years on

Aid workers reflect on the emotions they felt, the people they helped, and what rebuilding looks like in the aftermath of a devastating disaster.

World Vision Australia chief executive Daniel Wordsworth speaks to aid worker Clarence Sutharsan about their work in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

Clarence Sutharsan can still see the devastation of December 26, 2004, in front of him – the hundreds of dead bodies, the homes swept away, the people who lost everything.

“I saw one gentleman who was carrying his baby and walking on the road without any clothes, just a bare body,” he says.

“Unfortunately the child was dead, and his wife was dead and he was carrying the dead body. That still, I can remember that.”

The aid worker also remembers reconnecting families, providing relief and the “massive work” done to resettle people.

He said he was grateful for the “opportunity given to me to rehabilitate and connect the children and their families together”.

Twenty years on, aid workers who were on the ground have reflected on what they saw, the emotions they felt, and how things have changed over the past two decades.

Sutharsan was an aid worker with World Vision who lived in Sri Lanka. He immediately started work when the devastation rolled in.

One of the first things he did was go to a small bakery and tell them “whatever flour you have, bake some bread”, because the immediate provision of food and water was so essential.

He lived in Sri Lanka throughout the tumultuous three-decade civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sri Lankan government. Sutharsan said he has seen bomb blast injuries, flood and drought, but seeing the scale of devastation from the tsunami was “a very traumatic situation”.

“When I saw all these dead bodies”, he said, “my heart was really broken.”

World Vision chief executive Daniel Wordsworth was also in Sri Lanka for the relief effort, arriving in Colombo within 48 hours of the tsunami striking and working for a group called Christian’s Children Fund at the time.

World Vision Australia chief executive Daniel Wordsworth worked in Sri Lanka after the devastation of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Picture: Supplied

No stranger to disaster and destruction, Wordsworth had already worked in emergency relief for 10 years but he was struck be the absolute devastation caused by the tsunami. “It was just mile after mile of destruction and communities wiped out.”

Both Sutharsan and Wordsworth remarked on the generosity of aid across the globe and the large-scale response that caused massive transformations in countries.

“In particular in Indonesia and in Sri Lanka, both of those countries were in the middle of very vicious civil wars,” Wordsworth said. “And that just came to a grinding halt when the tsunami hit and both those conflicts have never broken out since.”

He reflected that relief agencies were able to help countries like Sri Lanka to “build back better”.

“The infrastructure that’s been rebuilt, the schools, the roads, the medical facilities, the water ports are all much better than they would have been without that large-scale response,” he said.

Sutharsan found that many communities have a “better life” now. “They have better healthcare facilities, better water connections – earlier they were drawing water from a well, now most of the resettled areas, they have pipe-borne water,” he said.

Last Christmas, just a day shy of 19 years since the disaster, Sutharsan sought out a girl he remembered he had reconnected with her parents during the tsunami’s aftermath. She had since married and had two children.

“My heart was really happy” he said. “That was my grateful story.”