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Excerpt: The Shrine

The children of Peraliya find comfort in cameras

By Satinder Bindra
CNN

Editor's Note: CNN New Delhi Bureau Chief Satinder Bindra was in Colombo, Sri Lanka, when the tsunami struck on December 26 and spent the next three weeks covering the disaster. Inspired by the courage of a 9-year-old boy who lost his mother, Bindra has written a book, "Tsunami: Seven Hours that Shook the World." These are select excerpts from the book.

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A boy plays outside his family's flooded tent in a village near Banda Aceh.

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Over the next few weeks, Peraliya was to become even a bigger draw for international journalists. They saw this place as an enduring symbol of the tsunami that had killed more than 30,000 people in this tiny island-nation.

But their arrival in large numbers was creating problems for the grieving locals, who had never interacted with visitors.

Most of the scribes were also unfamiliar with local customs and went about stomping around and photographing everything in the rubble, without appreciating the reality that what they thought was just debris was still someone's home.

Till just a few days earlier, Peraliya's residents had lived and raised their children there and they felt that journalists needed to ask them for permission before they entered and stepped all over what was still a piece of their lives.

With schools shut, the neighbourhood children were equally distressed and appeared withdrawn.

Noticing their predicament, Juliet Coomb, a 32-year-old volunteer and photojournalist from Melbourne, sought the help of an interpreter to unlock their pain.

"I was amazed with my findings and this is what a group of children told me: `The first few days we cried not due to the death of our families but fear of these big machines held by giants with white faces that shine bright lights in our eyes.' "

Given such anxieties, Juliet came up with the idea of "phototherapy." This therapy involved giving children cameras and film so that they could be entertained, feel empowered and have access to an avenue to communicate their feelings. She had tried phototherapy earlier with Vietnamese street children in 1992 and had learnt that children can come up with great achievements, if given a chance.

"Kids don't understand why people run around with a camera," she observed. That's why, she felt, they were bewildered. In the case of Peraliya's 484 children, she noted: "They had never seen such things before and what got even more difficult for them was to be photographed and probed. They were questioning why so many people were intruding into their lives."

Despite all these uncertainties, the children were quick to immerse themselves in their new project. They also took a shine to their talkative teacher, Juliet, who, in turn, was fascinated by their response: "They got the little kids' perspective on the big picture, managing to crawl under things and get into nooks and crannies that adults could never dream of getting to." Most importantly, the children were communicating their grief.

One child showed Juliet pictures of the home of his schoolteacher, who was killed when the train's engine crashed right into his living room. Juliet was moved to tears when the child explained: "I feel very sad I can't go to school because I have no teacher."

Weeks after the tsunami, Juliet learnt that the children were still scared of going to the beach. She tried to allay their fears by organizing her photography classes right there and was taken aback when many children just shot extreme close-ups of the sea and the waves.

"I'm frightened of the sea," one pupil told Juliet. "It eats people and it may eat me up."

Another student of hers expended his entire roll of film photographing a rock. "This is the last place I saw my relatives alive," he explained.

Most children were so scared of the train that they only took its pictures from a distance. But 13-year-old Teshan went into the train and shot "ghosts" using the simple technique of shaking his camera slightly just before pressing the shutter. Another orphan shot only silhouettes through the window, explaining his photography this way: "I lost several members of my family and all I see are their ghosts."

The children's pictures also reflected their confusion over why some things survived and some didn't. There were several snapshots of intact Buddha statues peering forlornly from among the rubble. Among Juliet's favourites was a snapshot of a Buddhist robe lying on a piece of twisted and tangled track. The robe's eye-catching orange colour stood out against the drab background, indicating that the children realized that only God or higher powers could withstand nature's might.

Curiously enough, I too had reached the same conclusion when I first visited Peraliya. The dented wagons illustrated nature's awesome fury and humankind's helplessness when confronted by it. But being able to capture something so poignant in just one picture spoke volumes about the children's artistic eloquence.

Empowered with their new set of skills, the children soon decided to turn the tables on pesky hacks and trained their cameras on them. At one point, a group of 20 children surrounded a five-member camera crew and put the fear of God into them.

"They intimidated them, standing like a wall around them," recalled Juliet, taking great delight in relating the crew's misery.

"They [the journalists] approached me for help and I asked them to be more thoughtful of what effect they had on others," she recounted. Juliet ended her interaction with the crew by giving them another stern lecture. "I told them that they shouldn't just walk in without even introducing themselves or even talking to people they photograph in their own language."

A few weeks into the project, Juliet began noticing big changes in the children. "When I first met them they were glum and you only got a smile out of them if you played a game." Soon, along with photography, the children were also learning how to make puppets. "It made them giggle, laugh, scream and shout," observed Juliet, adding that what they enjoyed the most was making puppets that looked like the Western relief workers who were helping them.

The children also opened up to her, discussing their ambitions to become doctors and engineers. None of them wanted to take up the more traditional activities such as fishing or farming, which taught her a lesson: "We just can't send such children sewing machines and guess this will help girls sew themselves out of sorrow." Juliet figured that these kids were very much part of the global world and their aspirations were being shaped by newer, more modern ideas than she had first anticipated.

With just a few days left for her departure, Juliet realized that she had actually been influenced more by those whom she had set out to change. "They could smile while they were living in a hell," she marvelled, appreciating their indomitable spirit to find the best things in life when they had been through the worst.

They also worked very hard to keep Juliet happy and their behaviour led her to conclude: "The people of Sri Lanka are very inspiring. I think they have an amazing attitude to get on with life and the Western world has a lot to learn from them because we get so easily put off by mundane things and believe others when they say we can't do so many things."

As she wound up her project, Juliet had all her cameras returned to her. The children kept their pictures, which were among the few things they could really call their own as they huddled in their threadbare tents.

Some of their pictures were purchased by the London-based Independent. The Royal Commonwealth Society also expressed serious interest in their art. Juliet has planned to use all the money from the sale of the pictures to help defray film and processing costs when she visits the children again.

She also plans to write a book with the help of world-renowned Australian cricketer Shane Warne, in order to help Peraliya's youngest members with their future educational needs.

Reflecting on her weeks spent in Sri Lanka, Juliet wondered many times if she was smart enough to keep pace with the children. Their photography was so lucid and expressive that she was convinced that even after 13 years in the business, she needed retraining.

I must confess I had similar thoughts. The children of Peraliya had retrained me not just about journalism but also life -- how to live it and how to be dignified and resolute after having lost so much.

For that alone, I knew I would be visiting Peraliya, its three forlorn wagons and wonderful children again.

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