TYRE: Vasanthi Darmadasa was sweeping her employers’ garden when her life changed. An Israeli bomb came thundering out of the sky, destroying the house and killing everyone there — except her.
“I was thrown to the ground by the shockwave. I didn’t feel anything in my legs and I did not feel anything in my hands,” said the young Sri Lankan maid who came to work in the southern Lebanese village of Yaruon, seeking a better life.
“I didn’t dare to look,” she said. “I knew what happened was horrible. I started to cry, and cry, and cry.”
When she opened her eyes she discovered that her employer Hassan Farhat, his mother, his wife and their two children — aged two-and-a-half and four months — were lying dead under the rubble of their house.
Three days after the air strike she was able to join a convoy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) heading for the southern port city of Tyre which although itself battered by Israeli raids has become a sanctuary for refugees.
Somehow, miraculously, the 20-year-old was not hit by the bombardment and the debris which flattened everything surrounding her.
The border village of Yaroun lies virtually in the middle of the maelstrom of fighting after Israel began a ground incursion into south Lebanon and engaged in deadly fighting with Hezbollah guerrillas around the neighbouring town of Bint Jbeil.
Vasanthi, who like the thousands of other Sri Lankan maids employed in Lebanon, was dreaming of going home with a little nest egg in hand for her family, now has lost everything.
“I don’t know what to do and I don’t even have my papers any more,” she said. Vasanthi stayed with a relative of her employer before being evacuated by the ICRC to Tyre.
She is now waiting with two of her compatriots to be evacuated to Beirut before trying to find a way to return home.
But even there a difficult welcome beckons, after Colombo asked its 80,000 citizens living in Lebanon to stay in the country despite the violence as their earnings represent an indispensable source of income for the island.
“We are not encouraging them to come back. In fact, we want them to go back (to Lebanon),” Labour Relations and Foreign Employment Minister Athauda Senevirathne said. In this volatile and dangerous area, few Sri Lankans are prepared to obey the urgings of their government.—AFP
