Reuters Posted online: Thursday, January 06, 2005 at 1848 hours IST Updated: Thursday, January 06, 2005 at 1851 hours IST
Karaitivu (Sri Lanka), January 6: Vinayadamoorthy Jeyakumaran drove east to west across Sri Lanka and back again to pick up a form from the Canadian High Commission in Colombo.
"I hear the Canadian embassy is giving open visas. I don't have anything left. I want to go to Canada," he says at a camp for displaced in eastern Sri Lanka, waving a photocopied piece of paper.
"I don't have any relatives there. Please help me."
Jeyakumaran, 35, is one of tens of thousands of Sri Lankans who lost members of their family and their livelihoods in the tsunami waves that swallowed entire fishing villages on Dec. 26.
"Two of my children died. My wife is in hospital. Her mind is not right because the children died," he said in broken English. "I lost my store," he added, almost in tears.
Canadian officials said there was no 'open door' policy, but the government would fast-track existing family visa applications and waive processing fees for new applicants seriously affected by the tsunami disaster.
Jeyakumaran has taken refuge with another 1,500 refugees in a boys' school in the village of Karaitivu, in the eastern district of Ampara, Sri Lanka's worst-hit coastline.
It is a far cry from the high-brow tourist resorts on Sri Lanka's southern coast, where an official clean-up operation is underway.
Around Karaitivu, those locals whose homes are standing are still pulling out corpses from debris and bodies lie submerged in stagnant pools formed by the tsunami waters.
A group of men on Thursday pointed at shapes lying in murky water.
"There are 10 bodies here. The water is giving us an infection," said one man, scratching his arm.
It is not surprising Jeyakumaran wants to start again somewhere else.
Close to the destroyed seafront, another man -- Thambirajah Rajalingam -- hurries over waving a letter from the Swiss embassy.
"My brother lives there," he said. Rajalingam had applied to move there before the tsunami but now he is more desperate than ever to leave.
The giant waves, which killed more than 30,000 people in Sri Lanka alone, changed the face of the country's coastline in a matter of minutes. The government has now decreed that houses must be built several hundred metres back from the seafront.
But there is no rebuilding as yet around Karaitivu. The area is a putrid wasteland.
Locals say aid agencies helped remove bodies in the first days after the tsunami but now no one comes to help.
