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Mark Ware and Heather Potter have started a phenomenon, a worldwide project that they hope will build new schools, new hopes and new lives for the millions of children affected by the Boxing Day tsunami.
Up to 40 per cent of the near 300,000 victims of the surges that spread across the Indian Ocean on December 26 were children. Many more remain severely traumatised by the experience, their families, houses, schoolbooks and schools washed away, their hopes of a normal life possibly still years away as the process of rebuilding their shattered communities slowly unfolds.
Galvanized into action by the horror of events unfolding on their television screen on December 26, Mr Ware and Ms Potter went to Sri Lanka in the days after the tsunami, eventually arriving at the Sri Sumanajoti Vidyalaya primary school at Unawatuna, a fishing and holiday hamlet 10km east of Galle in the island’s south. Hundreds of people had died on this once-beautiful stretch of beach.
“There was just one wall standing at the school,” says Mr Ware, a 37 year-old businessman from Australia’s Gold Coast region. “It broke our heart. These kids had nothing.
“We had read that art can be therapeutic for victims of trauma, but it was more because these poor kids had nothing to do and nowhere to go,” says Mr Ware.
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They drove to Colombo, cleared various stores of their paper and hundreds of packets of crayons and pastels and returned to Unawatuna to track down the school’s teachers.
“The brief was simple,” says Ms Potter. “We gave the kids the materials and asked the teachers to ask their pupils to draw their impressions of the last month. No-one mentioned the tsunami.”
The results are powerful, and the impressions drawn here are formed not by media images as seen on Western news channels but shaped by personal experiences of the waves. Many of the children at Unawatuna lost family and fellow classmates on Boxing Day. Some have never painted before.
Mr Ware and Ms Potter have created a wavearoundtheworld website to display the art. This more benign tsunami is already spreading along the Sri Lankan coast and to schools in all the devastated areas; Indonesia, Thailand, India, the Maldives and to Africa.
Starting with Sri Lanka, the art will be displayed on the website, which will function as a clearing house connecting stricken schools and their pupils with charities and individuals in the West and elsewhere, a one-on-one direct aid effort to benefit the schoolchildren artists.
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Eric Ellis is South East Asia correspondent for Fortune Magazine