Casey Johnson

MALD 2008

I arrived in Colombo a week before Christmas 2004 to the sound of Tamil Tigers and hard-line opposition parties in the Sri Lankan government beating their collective chests and threatening to officially scrap a fragile — some said already broken — two-year, peace agreement. The island was tense, but this was nothing new; neither were the allegations by UNICEF that the Tigers had stepped up recruiting and abducting children in what many saw as a period of rearmament. My idea was to move north, collect information on these allegations and better understand why a signed UN agreement to demobilize children had fallen apart. Then the tsunami struck.

I went east to the town of Batticaloa, where I met a cricket club scrambling to collect the dead and deliver aid to the living. These accountants, students, delivery drivers and I traveled up and down the politically fractured, tsunami-ravaged eastern coast. The photos in this exhibit are partly the story of these ad-hoc humanitarians. I wanted to document the magnitude of the destruction not with pictures of funeral pyres and toppled buildings alone. I wanted to show how the wave reflected similarly in both the eyes of a rebel and a mother and child waiting in the cab of a pickup truck as their life’s possessions were loaded into the bed. I wanted to show how anguish, fatigue and ultimately resilience fared on Tamil and Sinhala alike.