09:22 PM CST on Wednesday, December 29, 2004

The Washington Post

NAVALADY, Sri Lanka – Two hundred yards away from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking 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, getting ready 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!"

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 an estimated 78,000 people in Sri Lanka and 11 other countries. This is their story.

It is also the story of their chief rescuer, Mr. Sanders, a Sri Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live in Gaithersburg, Md., where he once owned a townhouse.

A member of the country's Tamil ethnic minority, Mr. Sanders, 50, studied to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to Switzerland in the 1980s to work with Tamil refugees displaced by fighting between Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan government forces, which have been observing a cease-fire since 2002.

In 1994, Mr. Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady, a fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula on Sri Lanka's economically depressed east coast, 150 miles northeast 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 4-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, attending school in the village nearby.

On Sunday morning, Mr. 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 around 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."

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

She ran to tell 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 had also run outside, some of them half-dressed. Mr. 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 toddler into his arms. Mr. 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. One of his employees yanked on the starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life – something that Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

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 also was pouring in directly from the mouth of the estuary about two miles away. Mr. Sanders feared the converging currents would swamp the small craft. At that point, Mr. 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."

With the water pouring into the mouth of the lagoon, he then 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 driver 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," Mrs. Sanders, 30, recalled. "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, Mr. Sanders and his wife recalled, 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," Mrs. Sanders said. But they had to leave the rest behind. There wasn't any room.

"People were crying, 'Help us, help us,' " Mrs. Sanders 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. The Sanderses 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 3 feet of sand. Several buildings, including the staff quarters, were entirely wiped away, and the others were damaged beyond repair.

Surveying the wreckage, Mr. 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, Mr. 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."