Another Terrorist Attack
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Laura is near hysterics and shouting something at me about a bombing as I climb into the passenger seat of our hired sedan. Anna is sitting silently next to her in the back seat with both hands over her mouth. Our driver is shushing Laura with one hand and turning up the news on the car radio with the other to better hear the reporter who is speaking Sinhala.
“There’s been another bombing.”
Our driver translates for us in barely more than a whisper, though the reporter is nearly screaming. The driver’s hand that had been quieting Laura is now holding up his forehead. The chaos coming over the radio is in stark contrast to the sound of palm trees in the light breeze that surrounds us. Our street is empty unlike St. Anthony’s Shrine which has just been bombed with over one hundred Easter Sunday worshippers inside.
An old man approaches our car carrying a small bag of bread. I imagine he has just picked up his breakfast and is going back home to eat, but he must have heard the commotion and pokes his head through my window and into our car to listen to the radio. He has a short conversation with our driver in Sinhala before shaking his head in sadness as he walks away.
Laura, Anna, and I are colleagues-cum-best friends on vacation together for a week in Sri Lanka. We were loading the car for a day at the beach when we heard about the attack.
Our driver is ready to leave a few minutes later—I guess we’re all desensitized to violence. He lived through Sri Lanka’s twenty-five-year civil war that only just ended in 2009. Anna, Laura, and I are from the United States where mass shootings are a part of our culture.
We are staying two hours south of the attacks, which seems to be far enough from the danger. Nothing can be done to help at the moment, so we continue our day as planned. Our driver whispers a blessing at the steering wheel and then puts his hands together in prayer where he rests his forehead for a few seconds before turning on the car.
My eyes moisten with tears behind my sunglasses while the trees zoom by in one long streak of green; this is the closest I’ve ever been to terrorism, and my emotions are stirring. I take my sadness as proof that I can still have a visceral reaction for the victims of violent attacks and feel relieved.
At any given moment in our world today, people are suffering unthinkable acts of horror, and while you can’t close your heart and mind to them completely, you can’t leave yourself wide open either. My tears are proof that my heart and mind aren’t stuck only slightly ajar; they can be opened further.
Our driver takes phone call after phone call. Except for the urgent conversations that he is having over the phone, the car is silent. The three of us keep quiet out of respect—we have spent the past two days with him and feel genuine concern. He picked us up at the airport when we arrived and we’ve been with him ever since.
“My family is safe,” he finally announces. We had all been too afraid to ask.
Another bomb goes off before we reach the beach. I promise myself that I’ll look into giving blood before we leave.
Our driver drops us off at a pristine beach with ideal waves for surfing. What I see is glorious ocean. For miles. White foam, surfers, bodyboarders. None of us can find Wi-Fi, but none of us really care. We swim, we snorkel, we flirt with the lifeguard.
It’s now late in the afternoon. A phone call interrupts our beach nap: it’s our driver, and he’s panicked. “I’m coming to pick you up now. There have been more bombings, and they’re targeting tourists. The whole country is on curfew.”
We’re jerked back to reality. People have been getting slaughtered while we’ve been trying to minimize our tan lines on the beach. An entire city has been devastated while I sip on my coconut. This is often my modus operandi: there is a tragedy, I vow to do something, I get distracted, and then I forget.
We are waiting for our driver as I imagine how the sandy beaches of Sri Lanka must make the country look outlined in white from space. Sri Lanka probably looks like a green eye from up there. Our driver has green eyes.
I meet the gaze of our driver as I jump into the front seat. His green eyes are bloodshot. By way of explanation, he says he hasn’t heard from his friend who was working at Shangri-La Hotel when one of the bombs exploded.
We stop at a grocery store on the way home from the beach for supplies in case we get stuck in our hotel for a few days. The entire store looks like an episode of Supermarket Sweep: Terrorism Edition. The aisles are crowded, and shopping baskets are piled high with provisions. Shoppers waste no time being friendly, so I quickly devise a strategy to win: we should focus on filling snacks that can be easily transported. We are scheduled to leave for the mountains tomorrow where we will spend the remainder of the week and I don’t want to waste food by leaving it behind. First, grab a gallon jug of water. Then, find protein: nuts, beef jerky, and peanut butter crackers. Last, get money ready for checkout because nobody is going to wait for me to figure out which coins and bills are which denominations. I curse myself for not keeping a clean wallet; there are at least three currencies in there.
I hear Sinhala all around me. Then I hear Anna.
“I’m hungry. I don’t want just snacks. Do you think the driver would stop for a roti if we asked?”
“Absolutely not. We are not stopping for anything. I’m not going to be caught after curfew in a developing country in the middle of a violent crisis. We are going back to the hotel and we are staying there. I’ll grab you extra cup o’ noodles, and you can thank me later.”
Laura turns from Anna to face me and rolls her eyes. Anna would usually argue, but we are all quiet on the drive back to the hotel.
The government has shut down social media and much of the internet for two major reasons: the first is to keep fake news from circulating, the second is to make communication more difficult for the terrorists, as not all have been taken into custody yet.
We hurry to contact our families once back at the hotel and find we can only communicate through iPhone apps. I tell my mom over FaceTime audio, “Don’t worry, we were about two hours away. We are planning on going to the mountains tomorrow, anyway. Yes, we will still go in the morning if it’s safe to travel. There are only small villages in the mountains, so we will be much safer. The news is saying that the hospitals need blood. Do you think I should go give blood? You’re right, hospitals could be targets too. Okay, I promise I won’t go. Needles do make me faint. Never mind, I already promised I wouldn’t go.”
As we watch the news again for more developments the next morning, the screen shows lines of people waiting to donate blood at hospitals. The driver says we are safe to drive to the mountains today as long as we are inside by curfew, which relieves the gals and me. We’ve already talked and agreed we wouldn’t be upset if he had to quit to go be with his family—we’re seasoned travelers and would figure something out—however, he’s been reliable and has made us feel safe, so we’re happy he will continue with us.
There is no discussion of changing our flights. We probably don’t need the discussion, as we all feel the same way: we still want to see Sri Lanka. The terrorists didn’t scare us away, staying is a small act of defiance.
A Sri Lankan woman named Dharisha, whom I’d met a few weeks ago at a mutual friend’s birthday dinner back home, texts me to see if I am safe. She hasn’t even found all of her own family yet, but she still has space in her heart for me.
The remainder of the week is spent basking in the glory that is the mountains of Sri Lanka. Every hue of green indexed by mankind can be found in the vast jungles.
I decide to make a donation to the Sri Lankan Red Cross when I get home.
Dharisha had told me not to take the train from the mountains back to Colombo when we left. It is still running, but the only passenger is the conductor. Our driver agrees to take us back to the city to catch our flight, but he will take us the long and winding way to avoid any potential danger. Five hours into driving those curving roads, I become car sick. Our driver pulls over and I vomit on the side of the road.
The three of us are in the airport waiting for our scheduled flight out of the country. A week has passed since the Easter Sunday bombings annihilated over 250 souls. Their body parts will have to be fit back together by cross-referencing DNA samples.
Stranded travelers are everywhere in the airport. They are sitting, standing, sleeping on the floor, crying, and waiting in lines. Nobody is smiling. Everybody is stiff and on edge; the tension and frustration are palpable.
A woman wearing a red vest with a British Red Cross patch stops us as we walk in to ask if we need help. When we walk around the corner, another woman asks us if we need help, though this woman is with the Danish Red Cross.
Soldiers with guns step over sleeping people—I don’t know what kind of guns, big guns. I text my ex-military brother a few photos.
Assault rifle
AR-15
AK-47
Submachine gun
The terrorists tried to blow Colombo off the map. They have caused a cataract in the green eye of Sri Lanka.
It is easy to be jejune and think that with my monetary donation to the Red Cross and the promotion of tolerance on my social media handles, I have done my part to help treat the cataract. But what will this accomplish? Because before Sri Lanka, it was Nigeria, and before Nigeria, it was New Zealand, and before New Zealand, it was someplace else.
But how do you live with the guilt of knowing that, through nothing but luck, you haven’t experienced such evil? Our hearts and minds have learned that if we don’t open too far then we don’t have to go through the trauma of processing. We do the little that we can and then think about something else, knowing that life will go on if we’re far enough removed.
I’ll have an existential crisis if I allow myself to linger on these thoughts for too long, but amidst all the death in this godforsaken world, there are still people like Dharisha and people willing to line up to give their own blood. For me, it has to be enough to know that.
