Memoir: My Personal Account of the

2017 Sri Lankan Floods (Revised)

Seth Chandler
EN 101
3/4/19

Meethotamulla Rd, Colombo, Sri Lanka, May 2017; one seemingly typical Saturday

afternoon spent doling out tantalizing pol sambol, spicy egg curry, and Suwandel rice into

transparent plastic bags resting in white cardboard boxes, which would accumulate in the

HQ’s main room, and to be promptly taken to the back of a Honda minivan and await

transport to

I was with a group called the Robin Hood Army, which is a volunteer based organization

centralized in South Asia that delivers surplus food from restaurants and our own cooked

meals to the less fortunate.

I had volunteered with them since April of that year, and the sight of shanty towns filled with

the downtrodden was rather commonplace, with their doddering elders and jersey-donning

children playing gaily, running barefoot on the Ceylonese dirt. While this Saturday felt like

our average embankment into alleviating the hunger of those on the fringes of society, it

would soon unfold itself into something of such emotional importance that it resonates with

me to this day.

Prior to our typical excursion to whatever destitute neighborhood or community desperately

needed the help of the Robin Hood Army, our team leader Hanzalah would inform the team

somberly that today’s mission would be distinctively different from previous missions.

“How come? Is it because of the floods?” I would ask inquisitively.

Hanzalah’s grimace in response, so out of place for a usual joyous face, only confirmed my

worst of suspicions and fears.

I had heard about the 2017 Sri Lankan floods, and that they had grown out of control from

the seasonal South Asian southeastern monsoons, which annually affected India, Nepal, and

of course, Sri Lanka, however, I was not prepared for the implications of the 2017 Sri Lankan

floods that would be apparent for all of the unlucky parties involved, on this fateful Saturday.

The minivan drove on a boisterous, sodden two-way street in the outskirts of Colombo, Sri

Lanka. From the foggy windows, I could see tarp tents erected alongside the road, their

occupants’ ramshackle houses of corrugated iron and palmwood laid in ruin from the deluge

caused by the floods. Hearing about the floods on the news was disheartening enough.

Seeing it in action was what broke my inner core: children and adults alike carrying only

pensive expressions and what little possessions they could salvage from their waterlogged

homes, their plight only slightly rectified by the hot chicken and egg curry we had brought

them in striped polyethylene bags, arranged in neat white cardboard boxes.

As we unloaded the van, I felt a tinge of sorrow, as if a melancholy chord had been struck by

the harp of my mind. In past expeditions to the slums of Colombo, we had delivered to

families who at the very least had a roof over their heads, where they could cook Maggi

noodles over hot plates and watch national cricket games on antiquated box televisions.

The denizens of these tarpaulin tents had hardly anything. The worst was yet to come, as I

would later discover; the death toll was merely 224, but over 600,000 Sri Lankans had been

displaced.
Despite the atypical albeit appalling circumstances, we unloaded the back of the minivan

crammed with multitudes of white boxes in plastic bags, and delivered it to a local contact in

the area, his Braveheart t-shirt sticking to his torso in the sweltering tropical heat. After some

time of our team leaders communicating with him in Sinhalese, we went tent-to-tent

delivering food to the destitute denizens of this modest tent village. Amidst the anguish that

had befallen them, I could sense an expression of gratitude and perhaps determination

emitting from their woeful faces.

We proceeded to the neighborhoods nearby that were fortunate enough to fend off the worst

of the flood; homes that weren’t completely engulfed in the torrent of monsoonal water. The

flood water itself was not completely evident until the RHA team and I were wading mid-calf

deep into the stagnant waters, bags of food in tow. A solid knock and a cry of “Aunty, oya

kama oneda?” was what coaxed women clad in multicolored saris, flanked by their wary

children, out to their front yards where we handed out the greasy boxes (or sometimes even a

whole bag) of hot, flavorful curries to eager palates. All throughout the worst of the day, the

RHA team and I tried to make light of the situation, being calf-deep in dirty flood water after

all, but to little avail.

When we ran out of food, we headed back to the minivan to drive back to our HQ, which was

customary at the end of each mission. However, this didn’t feel like a standard mission in the

slightest - thousands of people were without shelter or a permanent place to stay. And unlike

the previous missions where the impecunious of Sri Lankan society were targeted for aid

relief and distribution, the floods had affected everyone. My aging housekeeper Devika

confided in me one day that her nephew had lost a majority of his wardrobe to the flood

waters, and her brother’s house was decimated as a result. This was no ordinary crisis. The
afflicted were everyday Sri Lankans, who expected heavy rain from the seasonal

southwestern monsoons, but were not expecting a deluge reminiscent of the aftermath of

hurricanes in North and Central America, which would not only take the entire country off

guard, but would cause nationwide hardship and mourning of those whose lives were lost in

the flood.

Sri Lankans were not strangers to tragedy - the death tolls that emerged from the Sri Lankan

Civil War were still fresh in every Sri Lankan’s mind (especially the Tamils), and while I had

sympathized with those affected by the war, I only had second-hand experience through

novels and scathing newspaper articles - this flood I had seen and experienced from my own

two eyes. Few things in my life had been as empathetically tragic than my own experience in

the Sri Lankan floods.

It was this event that served as the catalyst of my determination to serve as a humanitarian for

the greater good, for I had seen far too many miserable faces than to turn around and let them

suffer. It is with this experience that has given me a insatiable yet healthy desire to quell the

needs of whose are too low in a position to do it themselves.

As a result of my service with the Robin Hood Army, especially this particular event, I

became engaged in other local charities, such as Bethlehem Creche and the Colombo School

for the Deaf & Blind (both in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka). Upon moving back to the

United States, I contemplated a career in the Peace Corps after graduation; all in this because

of the accursed flood of waters of May 2019. As I look towards the Coins for Kids tin can

collecting spare change for disenfranchised children, to the left of my computer desk, nearly

two years (March 2019) from the monsoonal catastrophe, that desire to help out humanity is

pacified… for now.

Following the process of writing this memoir, from professional review and from my own

perusal of the entire essay after reviewing it myself, I realized that any accounts detailing my

interactions with the Robin Hood Army team had been rather meager, to which I addressed

with adding in these aforementioned interactions into the complete account; of which I

assumed would be relevant to the final draft of the essay.

Under close scrutiny of the rough draft, I concluded that there was much more to be desired

in terms of how the accounts of the flood had truly affected me to this day, this was rectified.

Despite the flaws of the rough draft, writing out the initial draft and subsequently correcting it

in this final draft, it was a heavy emotional load to get off my chest, nonetheless, to finally

write a memoir detailing my first-hand experience of the desolate aftermath of the 2017 Sri

Lankan floods.