"...suddenly, my son Gib was doing magic tricks, my 10-year-old daughter was teaching the girls new dances, and my wife Connie found herself consoling mothers who had lost entire families."
Everywhere they went, they witnessed the decimation of lives ... rubble on the beaches, debris in the roadway and pieces of homes strewn across the landscape. "It is impossible to imagine the wall of water rising up and taking everything away," Selleca says.
She describes watching two women walking down the beach together. It had taken the former neighbors 15 days to find the courage to come back and see what might be left of what were once their homes. "...veils of sadness thickly laying on their faces... One 'lucky'; lucky to have found the body of her 4-year-old daughter...the other...not so lucky...still searching without hope to find her 1-1/2-year-old baby." Selleca watched as the latter found and then desperately clung to a piece of clothing belonging to her child.
As a mother, Selleca could relate to the pain felt by the women she encountered. This led to her bearing a lot of emotional burden, Tesh says. "There wasn't a single therapist around to help people in dealing with their fear and heartbreak," he explains.
While in a refugee camp, Tesh and his family listened to survivors repeating similar stories over and over again. "As the kids grew more comfortable with us, the word 'Kanawu' kept coming up, which I found out (translated from Tamil) means 'nightmare.' More specifically, these children, who lost brothers and sisters and moms and dads, were talking about the tsunami. Their 'Kanawu' was the tsunami," Tesh says.
Selleca came up with the idea to have all the kids in the camp draw a picture of their 'kanawu.' After finding paper and crayons, the children drew what was on their minds. Tesh says, "The pictures were of people standing on top of houses...pictures of fishing boats smashed to pieces, and of children running." Tesh emphasizes that these are sights the children witnessed personally - "they don't have the news over there."
