Orphans Saved - UBM [David Eells]

Two hundred yards from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking, he said, about the sermon he was due to deliver in the chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the children under his care were still in their rooms, grooming themselves for services. Then the tsunami hit.

At that point, Sanders said, he recalled a line from the Book of Isaiah: "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it". He raised his hand in the direction of the flood and shouted, "I command you in the name of Jesus -- stop!" The water then seemed to "stall, momentarily", he said. "I thought at the time I was imagining things"...

All of the orphans lives were miraculously saved. Praise the Lord for HIS miracles.

The full, incredible story is below.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35206-2004Dec29.html

Outracing The Sea, Orphans in His Care
In Sri Lanka - By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page A01

NAVALADY, Sri Lanka, Dec. 29 -- Two hundred yards from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking, he said, about the sermon he was due to deliver in the chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the 28 children under his care were still in their rooms, grooming themselves for services.

Then he heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room, and his wife burst through the door, a frantic look on her face.

"The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the sea!"

But the children did not die. Thanks to quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow started on the first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the ranks of countless survivors of the epic earthquake and coastal disaster that so far has claimed the lives of more than 77,000 people in Sri Lanka and 11 other countries. This is their story.

It is also the story of their chief rescuer, Sanders, a Sri Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live in Gaithersburg, where he once owned a townhouse. A member of the country's Tamil ethnic minority, Sanders, 50, studied to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to Switzerland in the 1980s. He worked with Tamil refugees displaced by fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan government forces, both of which have been observing a cease-fire since 2002.

In 1994, Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady, a small fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula on Sri Lanka's economically depressed eastern coast, about 150 miles east of Colombo, the capital. He built the orphanage with donations and money from the sale of his Maryland townhouse, he said.

With ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other, the four-acre orphanage was a strikingly beautiful place, set in a grove of stately palms. The children -- some of whom had lost their parents in the civil war -- lived four to a room in whitewashed cottages with red tile roofs and attended school in the village nearby. Bougainvillea spilled from concrete planters.

"People used to come and take photographs of the flowers", said Sanders, a handsome, youthful-looking man who speaks precise idiomatic English and peppers his conversation with Scripture. "They used to say it looked like Eden".

It was a busy, happy time at the orphanage. On Friday, the children sang, danced and performed the Nativity scene at their annual Christmas pageant, followed the next day by Christmas services and dinner for 250 guests, many of them Hindus from the nearby village. Sanders was so exhausted by his duties as host, he said, that he went to bed early on Saturday night. He also forgot to check, as he usually does, on whether the outboard motor had been removed from the orphanage launch, as it was supposed to be each night as a precaution against theft.

It proved to be the luckiest mistake he ever made.

'A Thunderous Roar'

On Sunday morning, Sanders said, he rose at his customary hour of 4 a.m. to wander the grounds and pray, then went back to bed. He woke up again about 7:30. He recalled the stillness. Not a breath of air stirred the surface of the sea. Small waves rolled listlessly onto the beach, then retreated with a gentle hiss.

"It was so calm and so still", he recalled. "The surface of the ocean was like a sheet of glass. Not a leaf moved". Two young men on his staff wandered down to the ocean for a swim.

It isn't clear who saw the wave first. Sanders's wife, Kohila, said she was alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as Kohila was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-old daughter. Kohila ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building sea. Even the color of the water was wrong: It looked, she said, "like ash".

Kohila ran to inform her husband, who told her not to panic, he recalled. "I said, 'Be calm. God is with us. Nothing will ever harm us without His permission'".

Wrapped in a sarong, he ran outside and looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he said, was a "30-foot wall of water", racing toward the wispy casuarina pines that marked the landward side of the beach.

With barely any time to think, let alone act, he ran toward the lagoon side of the compound, where the launch with its outboard motor chafed at a pier. By then, many of the children had heard the commotion and run outside, some of them half-dressed. Sanders shouted at the top of his lungs, urging them all toward the boat.

Desperate, he asked if anyone had seen his daughter, and a moment later one of the older girls thrust the child into his arms. Sanders heaved her into the boat, along with the other small children, as the older ones, joined by his wife and the orphanage staff, clambered aboard on their own. One of his employees yanked on the starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life -- something that Sanders swears had never happened before.

"Usually you have to pull it four or five times", he said.

Crammed with more than 30 people, the dangerously overloaded launch roared into the lagoon at almost precisely the same moment, Sanders said, that the wall of water overwhelmed the orphanage, swamping its single-story buildings to the rafters.

"It was a thunderous roar, and black sea", he said.

As the compound receded behind the boat, Sanders said, he watched in amazement as the surging current smashed a garage and ejected a brand-new Toyota pickup. "The roof came flying off -- it just splintered in every direction", he recalled. "I saw the Toyota just pop out of the garage".

The vehicle bobbed briefly on the surface, collided with a palm tree -- the mark of its impact was clearly visible Wednesday -- then slid over the edge of the compound in the torrent before slipping beneath the rapidly rising surface of the lagoon. Another vehicle, a maroon van, was smashed against a palm tree. A three-wheeled motorized rickshaw parked on the property whirled around as if it were circling a drain, Kohila Sanders recalled.

A Narrow Escape

The orphans' ordeal did not end when their boat pulled away from the shore.

Not only was water cascading over the lagoon side of the peninsula but it was pouring in directly from the mouth of the estuary about two miles away. Sanders feared the converging currents would swamp the small craft. At that point, Sanders said, he recalled a line from the Book of Isaiah: "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall raise up a standard against it".

He raised his hand in the direction of the flood and shouted, "I command you in the name of Jesus -- stop!" The water then seemed to "stall, momentarily", he said. "I thought at the time I was imagining things".

As the launch then headed away from the mouth of the lagoon, he began to worry that waves would overtake them from behind, swamping the small boat. Reasoning that it was better to hit the waves head on, he said, he ordered the helmsman to reverse direction and head back toward the open ocean.

But that maneuver carried its own risks. As it made for the mouth of the lagoon, the boat was broadsided and nearly capsized by the torrent pouring over the peninsula. "The children were very frightened", recalled Kohila Sanders, 30. "We were praying, 'God help us, God help us'. "

As the waters began to roll back out to sea, the turbulence subsided. It was then, Sanders and his wife said, that they became aware of the people crying for help as they bobbed in the water nearby. They were villagers who had been swept off the peninsula. The passengers rescued one young man, who was "howling for his missing wife and daughters", Kohila Sanders said. But they had to leave the rest behind. There wasn't any room.

"People were crying, 'Help us, help us', " Kohila said. "Children were crying".

Eventually the boat made it to the opposite shore, about a mile and a half distant in the city of Batticaloa. Sanders and his wife, their daughter and perhaps a dozen of the orphaned and now-displaced children have found temporary refuge in a tiny church; the rest have been sent elsewhere.

The city is short of food and water, and on Wednesday afternoon, corpses were being burned where they had been found at the edge of the lagoon. With more than 2,000 people dead in Batticaloa district, local officials say that they lack the means to dispose of the bodies properly and that residents are burning them as a precaution against disease.

The scene at the orphanage was one of utter devastation. The grounds were covered by up to three feet of sand. Several buildings, including the staff quarters, were entirely wiped away, and the others were damaged beyond repair. A body burned near the ruined chapel.

Surveying the wreckage, Sanders broke down and cried. "Twenty years of my life put in here, and I saw it all disappear in 20 seconds", he said between sobs. The orphanage had no insurance.

But at other moments, Sanders was philosophical about his loss. "If there was anyone who should have got swept away by this tidal wave, it should have been us", he said. "We were eyeball to eyeball with the wave".

January 4, 2005

Diyana Sanders' story, Dayalan's sister

'Going to rebuild'

The phone rang at 6 a.m. Sunday in the North Potomac home of Diyana Sanders. It was her brother-in-law in London, telling of a catastrophic earthquake near Indonesia and sketchy reports of tsunamis ravaging the island nation of Sri Lanka. Her brother, Dayalan Sanders, runs an orphanage for 35 children in a province on the eastern coast of the island. The orphanage is surrounded by water, she said, and she didn't think anyone could survive.

Diyana Sanders and her husband turned on the television, went online, searched for news, but frustrated because coverage was confined to airports and capital cities. Then came another call from London from a cousin who had talked to her brother: He was OK. His wife was OK. All 35 children and the five staffers, OK. But the orphanage was ruined.

On Monday, Sanders talked to her brother for a very 15 brief minutes.

"His wife and the children are in a state of shock", she said. "He sounded dejected, but he said he is not giving up. He is going to rebuild".

Dayalan Sanders, 50, left Gaithersburg in 1997 to start the Refugee Relief Gospel Mission. Within it, the Samaritan Children's Home houses orphans displaced by a bloody 20-year war. He built the mission in a small village near Nabalady in the eastern province of Batticoloa, between a lagoon and the Indian Ocean.

It took only moments for the once idyllic setting to turn to chaos, he told his sister. One of the children ran up to his wife; "the sea is coming", the child said. She shepherded the children and the staffers onto a boat as the first wave hit, then went back to find Dayalan, who survived the initial rush of water by clinging to a tree. The water rose waist-high in seconds. The couple climbed aboard the boat as the second wave approached.

Dayalan read verses from the Bible as the 20-foot-high wall of water carried the fiberglass boat helplessly along. Finally, the wave crested and began to recede, dropping the boat and its passengers safely onto the lagoon.

While Diyana Sanders calls their survival "a story of miracles", she said the real trial is only beginning.

"These are people who ... have no place to go", she said. "They have to face it. They have to start rebuilding their lives".

Of the more than 1,000 families near the mission, only 25 appear to have survived intact, Dayalan told his sister. The receding waters dragged five feet of sand over roads, making it virtually impossible for rescue crews to reach the remote eastern provinces.

He told Diyana of dangers other than disease and homelessness that face the survivors: The tsunamis displaced land mines left over from the war. The Sri Lankan government has already reported several injuries to rescue workers.

"There are mines everywhere, which have shifted and nobody knows where", she said. "It is a disaster within a disaster".

Dayalan Sanders returned to the mission and told his sister what he found: The living quarters were gone. The main walls were listing; the rushing water uprooted chunks of the foundation. Electrical generators, gone; computers, gone; the equipment, all gone.

Yet, somehow, the small chapel remained standing.

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