This is an old building of the Jaffna Central College which has been damaged by the war. The school however is functioning and also has a computer lab and a non formal IT unit which serves as a training institute.
While we were moving in the main street in the distance the burnt Jaffna Library was another symbol of the ethnic conflict near the perished Dutch Fort.
While I was schooling I was interest in knowing about the outside world. The Jaffna Library was a treasure trove to me. Those wonderful books of more than 95,000 volumes and numerous other culturally important and irreplaceable manuscripts had been reduced to ashes.
When Rev. Fr. Long, Rector of St. Patrick's College, Jaffna, heard about the tragedy he died of an instant heart attack.
A similar event shocked the world in September 2004, where a fire destroyed 50,000 a unique collection of German literary works and historical literature irretrievably at the 300-year-old Duchess
Anna Amalia Library in the eastern German town of Weimar. Then German State Secretary for Culture Christina Weiss said when she heard of the dissaster "This is a national culture catastrophe and a great loss for the world heritage". The destruction by arson of the Jaffna Library too was a cultural loss for the entire world and caused an everlasting distress to the people of Jaffna and others around the world.
When we were entering into the Jaffna hospital-visiting patients and others over crowded it. When I was moving in the wards with German students tsunami victims overflowed the wards. Once my brother also was a patient for his hand injuries by the indirect events of the war in the same wards.
While I was looking at the patient I recalled the events of two decades ago, the visits I had with my brother. The tsunami victims were on the verandah floor as there was no sufficient space inside the ward. Fredrike Wagner and other German students were giving chocolates and various other sweets to the tsunami victims who were hospitalized there. Though they were in deep sorrow by the loss of their kith and kin and the savings of their lifetime, they were happy to receive those gifts with a smile.
I was moving around the wards with the Sinhalese couple and the local TV personnel. We were talking to a tsunami patient who was on the ward floor. He described the tragedy of the fateful day's disaster; how he escaped miraculously from the tidal wave disaster. He was washed away by the tidal waves in Mulaitivu and was shifted to Jaffna hospital for urgent medical treatment. He was trapped in a barbed wire and one of his fingers was severely affected by the moving waves here and there. The tissues of his fingers had torn apart and the bones too were fractured. After timely and extensive treatment he was recovering rapidly. When I touched his affected finger softly he was screaming like hell.
We all came out of the wards and started to unload the medicines and other medical instruments from a medium-sized lorry. German internship students were tirelessly doing relief task, which they have chosen voluntarily. We were all in a helpless position other than delivering medicinal items to those affected victims. Life was so disastrous for those victims and the passage of time will be the only cure for their trauma.
After nearly seventeen years I was moving around the Jaffna hospital once again. The last time I was there it was to hospitalize my paternal grandmother, which was in 1987. At that time the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) occupied Jaffna. There were hundreds of injured IPKF troops who were hospitalized after a heavy clash with the LTTE. A few days earlier a number of doctors and patients were killed by the advancing IPKF in the hospital premises. The patients were in a panic there.
When I by my grandmother's bed, an IPKF officer was watching me but I failed to notice him. The patients complained to the Medical-Officer-in Charge out of panic and subsequently I had to leave the hospital with my grandmother in a pushbike crossing the Jaffna streets, which was still under fight between the LTTE and the IPKF.
It was unbelievable that I was doing relief work in the same hospital after so many years with German intern students where once I left without any guarantee of life in the battling streets.
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