ValerieRaymond

When Valerie Raymond arrived to take up her posting in 2002 as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, she had no way of knowing that she would come face to face with the world’s deadliest tsunami in history.  

An accomplished diplomat and Head of Mission, she and her husband Tom de Faye (Major-General ret’d) would face the test of a lifetime. Valerie drew on all her resources, experience, energy, and empathy to lead her team and the Canadian response during this trying time.

Having retired to Victoria in 2012, Valerie penned a series of articles during the COVID-19 lockdowns on her experience in Sri Lanka. Sadly, she was diagnosed in September 2023 with an advanced stage of cancer and passed away on December 11, 2023. Angela Bogdan, who succeeded her as High Commissioner, worked with Valerie in her final months to compile the piece which follows.

Part 1
THE BOXING DAY TSUNAMI
AND THE FIRST SIX WEEKS

It was December 2004, and I was in my third year as Canada’s High Commissioner to the beautiful tropical island of Sri Lanka.

My husband Tom and I were spending the holidays at our favourite ocean-front resort, a three-hour drive South of Colombo. Christmas Day was full of beautiful blue skies and 30 degree Celsius weather, so we spent the morning walking the lovely beach, collecting colourful seashells along the way. 

Perhaps it was serendipity that we passed on a beach walk the next morning. Instead, around 9 a.m., we observed an incredible phenomenon from our third-floor balcony overlooking the Indian Ocean: the ocean had receded beyond what the eye could see. 

Mesmerized, we watched holiday-makers frolic on the exposed rocks and reefs, when suddenly the ocean came thundering in at breakneck speed and with terrifying force. Although we didn’t know it at that moment, Tom and I were witnessing the deadliest tsunami in recorded history, one that would claim some 230,000 lives in only a few short hours. 

We watched in horror as the Indian Ocean Tsunami slammed into the coast of Sri Lanka; the mountainous wave surging and ebbing. Suddenly, everyone and everything on the beach disappeared. We ran down the three flights of stairs to the open-air lobby, which was now empty – the check-in desks, gift shops, and hair salon were all gone. 

Although cell service was down, we soon learned via the BBC that a powerful undersea earthquake had unleashed a mammoth tsunami that crashed into parts of Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka. We later learned that within a five-kilometre radius of where we were, near the city of Galle, some 5,000 people were swept out to sea. In all, the tsunami claimed more than 30,000 lives in Sri Lanka and left hundreds of thousands homeless. 

I was extremely fortunate that the mission’s management team had stayed in Sri Lanka for the holidays. With the coastal road destroyed, Tom and I only managed to return to Colombo the following evening. By then, my second-in-command had shut down normal business and instituted 24/7 operations. 

Over the next few months, we were consumed by countless evolving challenges: consular crises, media scrutiny, official visits, and much more. 

First, we needed to find out whether any Canadians had died in the tsunami and support those needing assistance. 

There were so many heartbreaking stories and so many tears shed in my office over pots of Ceylon tea and boxes of Kleenex. The need for compassion while facing ever-growing demands from Ottawa weighed heavily on me. 

One Canadian International Development Agency officer and his daughter survived the tsunami by climbing a palm tree and hanging on for dear life.

An immigration officer was driving on the coastal road with his wife and young children when the wave swept up their vehicle. As it careened out of control, they repeatedly struck pedestrians. They survived but were so traumatized that I made the difficult decision to medevac them back to Canada for counselling. 

One of our Sri Lanka staff lost her entire house and all its contents. 

Another local staff member walked for hours through the wreckage of a derailed train in search of his nieces. The wrecked locomotive named Manitoba was one of 10 named for a Canadian province, gifted from Canada decades earlier under the Colombo Plan. His nieces and some 1,700 passengers on the crowded Colombo to Galle train were never seen again. 

Although I encouraged our local staff to take as much time off as they needed, most insisted on working to help contribute to their country’s recovery.

I still remember my very first call with Ottawa. “Have you sent staff to the disaster site?” they asked. 

“Well, no,” I responded. The tsunami had crashed through 1,000 kilometres of Sri Lankan coastline – there was no single disaster site. 

We coordinated with other “like-minded” missions – the Americans, Brits, Australians, the European Union, and several United Nations agencies – to deploy staff and drivers on search and rescue missions in search of our and our partner countries’ nationals. It was a labour-intensive but successful approach to finding Canadians and bringing them to Colombo for assistance. 

While many of our rescued nationals were grateful and reasonable, others, deeply traumatized, were irrational, belligerent, and abusive. 

I received a much-appreciated early call from my counterpart at Canada’s much larger diplomatic mission in neighbouring Delhi. “Tell me what support you need and I’ll have staff on the next plane,” they said.

Ottawa managers were similarly helpful, offering to send temporary duty reinforcements. Perhaps curiously, my management team of five Canadians initially resisted. I wanted to first clarify what roles we would assign temporary duty staff, who would arrive with many skills but no knowledge of the country. I also wanted to be sure they would not cause friction with our team. 

In hindsight, bringing in extra staff from neighbouring missions and Ottawa sooner would have been a better decision because the scope and complexity of our operations were about to expand massively.  

I look back on those six weeks as among the most challenging of my career.

The sudden devastation of the 2004 tsunami was caught on video by countless tourists.

Part 2
THE NEXT SIX WEEKS, HUMANITARIAN AID,
VISITS, VISITS, AND MORE VISITS

While mission staff continued to search for Canadians needing assistance, another priority was to provide Sri Lanka with immediate humanitarian support. 

When the Sri Lankan government called in the resident diplomatic corps only days after the tsunami to ask for immediate assistance, I advised that two Canadian Forces aircraft were already in the air fully loaded with relief supplies for the local and international Red Cross. 

A politically active Sri Lankan–Canadian diaspora com-munity, largely based in Toronto, lobbied strongly for a vigorous Canadian response. This led to the deployment of a special team of 200 military personnel – the DART or Disaster Assistance Response Team – requiring full support from our mission. Canada’s military attaché based in Delhi also redeployed to Colombo. 

We spent a few sleepless nights negotiating with the Sri Lankan government to have Canadian soldiers assist in the eastern part of the island, where 10,000 people died and 180,000 had lost their homes. We had seemingly come to an agreement, but Sri Lanka refused to allow our soldiers to bring their weapons while our military commanders insisted they must. Best left unsaid how we solved this not-insignificant challenge. 

During their stay, the DART lived roughly in an abandoned sugar factory and made critical contributions to the disaster efforts: they provided medical support to thousands of victims, delivered several million litres of drinking water, cleared tons of rubble, repaired schools and built temporary shelters. 

Naturally, the disaster received massive global media coverage. Canadians responded to news of the devastation with overwhelming generosity. Individual Canadians donated almost $200 million to tsunami aid and reconstruction. The federal government responded in kind with a dollar-for-dollar matching fund. 

At the mission, we provided ongoing advice to the Canadian International Development Agency on where assistance was most needed. Our Canadian International Development Agency staff supported the Red Cross and other Canadian NGOs who responded quickly by distributing food, medicine, and clothing, and building temporary housing, often working with local Sri Lankan partners.  

World-wide news coverage of the disaster also meant that media interviews became a significant demand on my time. I assigned one staff member as a full-time media officer to respond to interview requests, advise where and how to travel to tsunami-ravaged regions, and provide suggestions for government and non-government interviewees. I quickly learned to take 10 quiet minutes before every interview to think through messaging. I also learned it was best to do all interviews outside on the High Commission grounds as harried staff did not need the burden of camera crews inside the Mission. 

One morning, as I approached the Mission, I saw a massive crowd at our gates and down the road. My stomach turned
to knots.

Canada had just announced special measures to ease entry into our country for Sri Lankan tsunami victims, the first country to do so. Somehow, a rumour spread that we had announced an “open visa” policy, meaning Sri Lankans would no longer require visas to enter Canada. Although the rumour was untrue, we had trouble shutting it down. We put ads in newspapers, took media interviews, and sent staff up and down the long queues to tell people in English, Tamil, and Sinhala that there was no “open visa” program. Still, the crowd grew larger.  

People began pushing and shoving under the baking heat. We worried about violence breaking out under the ever-watchful eye of visiting Canadian media. Eventually, immigration staff from neighbouring missions arrived to assist our weary team but it took almost two weeks to gain control.

Consular and immigration issues aside, our biggest challenge during these weeks was managing multiple overlapping visits. 

Politicians from across the globe came to visit the country. When it was all over, the Sri Lankan foreign secretary told me his ministry had managed over 80 high-level visits in six weeks. Ostensibly, the visits were to assist, but, he lamented, they were mostly “political tourism” or TV coverage for home constituencies.  

What of Canada? With a large politically active Sri Lankan-Tamil population, visits were a political imperative.

Members of DART’s Operation Structure clearing trees and debris

First up was a visit by the federal Minister of Health – the “duty Minister” during the Christmas holiday season. I recall the unusual situation of standing beside the Minister on the Colombo airport tarmac in the middle of the night to greet the arriving Canadian Forces aircraft carrying the military’s DART team. 

While preparing for the Health Minister’s visit, we got word that Prime Minister Paul Martin would visit Sri Lanka. Normally, visits from the Prime Minister were months in the making. We had 11 days. 

As with all Prime Ministerial visits, an advance team arrived a few days early to review planning. This team came armed with the same playbook they used for standard visits abroad. I tried but failed to convince them that we should make a few adjustments in our requests to the overwhelmed Sri Lankan government. 

A key element of the visit was a trip to the disaster site in the east, where the DART was deployed. It was too far to drive so we had to request Sri Lankan military helicopters. This was the fourth time I had made such a burdensome request, so I was sure I had worn the welcome mat. But in the end, four large helicopters were generously provided to accommodate the Prime Minister’s delegation.

Three weeks after the tsunami, with the Prime Minister arriving in a few days, three members of the mission management team came by my office to remind me of an earlier promise: we would look out for one another.

They insisted I go home and sleep for a day. And so, I did. I slept and ate, then slept and ate again for 24 hours. I returned Monday morning refreshed and deeply grateful to my wonderful colleagues.

That evening we held a small reception for the Prime Minister to meet mission staff and hear first-hand stories of the tsunami. He recognized that we were a small team juggling many challenges and his gracious words meant a great deal to us all.

Later, I was also grateful when the Prime Minister asked me for a private briefing on the Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese-led government and the Tamil Tigers that by then had consumed the country for 20 years, killing some 60,000.

Diaspora politics had put added pressure on the mission. Toronto-based Tamil-Canadian leaders insisted that the Sri Lankan government was blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid to Tamil regions. While Mission staff consulted extensively with the United Nations, NGOs, and other reliable “on the ground” contacts who found no instances of withheld aid, the “suppressed aid” campaign continued to escalate in the lead-up to the Prime Minister’s visit.

To assuage anxious Ottawa colleagues, I sent two outstanding Tamil staff members to investigate – one to the Tamil-dominated north, where most of the civil war fighting took place and one to the east, where there is a large Tamil population. They returned with detailed reports and in an excellent briefing for the Prime Minister and his staff, they shared their findings: there was no evidence whatsoever that the Sri Lankan government was preventing aid from reaching hard-hit Tamil communities. Finally, we put this issue to bed.

The next day, as we flew aboard a helicopter over tropical jungle and highland tea estates, Prime Minister Martin commented on the beauty of the countryside. 

Eventually, we reached the east coast. From the shoreline to one kilometre inland was a wasteland. I could see that the scale of the destruction left an impact on the delegation. Meeting with tsunami victims amidst the rubble and devastation also brought home the magnitude of suffering. The mobile health units set up by our DART and other Canadian support were working to make a difference. 

All the while, we continued to plan for other official visits. Parliamentarians, the Minister of Defence, the Canadian International Development Agency President, and the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff all came, requiring extensive mission support. We also had to provide support for “unofficial” visits from an Ontario delegation, NGOs, diaspora groups, and teams of doctors.

At this point, the mission team was burned out, even with the support of temporary staff who came to assist for a week or two. Staff began to push back against demanding “unofficial” visits. Ottawa colleagues tried to discourage well-intended Canadians from coming with little success. 

With all flights arriving after midnight, staff spent too many nights at the airport meeting Canadian delegations and trying to gain clearance for their medications and other supplies. I knew I was pushing staff much too hard when two overworked immigration officers collapsed. Thankfully they rallied after a few days of rest.

One evening, about a month after the tsunami, as I prepared to go home after the daily call from Ottawa, I remembered an unopened package that had arrived that day in the diplomatic bag. In it, I discovered a note and a lovely package of spa products sent by a friend and colleague, then heading to one of our Consulates in the US She wrote about how she didn’t want to call me during such a busy time, but hoped these items would bring at least a little comfort. Somehow this thoughtful gesture brought to the fore all my suppressed emotions of the past month – heartbreak for the terrible personal losses of our local staff and my internal conflict between supporting an overburdened and exhausted team while meeting Ottawa’s unremitting demands. I closed my office door and wept.

Angela, Valerie’s successor, with the graduates of Canada’s first income-generation and livelihoods training programs for tsunami-affected women – a program initiated by Valerie. Photo by Gary R. Firth

Part 3
THE AFTERMATH

Early on, colleagues in Ottawa had repeatedly asked whether sending trauma counsellors to meet with staff would be helpful. We were months out from the initial disaster, and we now felt the management team was right to take up their offer.

To be mindful of cultural sensitivities, we informed our Sri Lankan staff that the counselling services were purely voluntary. While the staff were initially wary, they soon asked the counsellors to stay an extra week. The visit was helpful beyond my expectations. 

Three months after the disaster, Tom and I decided to drive the restored coastal road around the island to assess tsunami reconstruction. Our first stop was at a memorial for the lost 1,700 passengers and crew of the Manitoba locomotive. 

We spent a day at the ocean-front resort where we had witnessed the Boxing Day tsunami, which was now virtually empty. The manager told us that painful memories kept locals away from the resort. Foreign visitors also had yet to return to the country.

We walked miles along the beach where a few modest resorts had once stood. Now, the beach was littered with piles of debris and refuse. Most poignant were the many human bones that had washed up on the beach, fragments of the thousands of lives the massive wave had claimed. 

Curiously, there was a complete absence of animal bones washing up on the shores despite Sri Lanka having many kinds of wildlife, including herds of elephants. The general theory was that animals must have run to high ground before the wave made landfall thanks to their often-suspected but never-proven “sixth sense” that warned them of the oncoming disaster. 

As we continued our drive up the east coast, it was disheartening to see that thousands were still living in tent cities despite the massive amounts of foreign aid received. But I did feel a sense of pride that Canadian funds were helping build new housing.

Some time later, I attended a dinner party where I sat next to a prominent Sri Lankan businessman. Over dinner, he told me a story that haunts me to this day. His niece, living in London with her British husband and two young sons, had come to Sri Lanka for the Christmas holidays. Along with his niece’s parents, the family was visiting the Yala nature reserve when the tsunami struck. The entire family was swept out to sea. Only his niece survived. Now living with him and his wife, he shared his niece’s unbearable grief at the loss of her entire family.  

A few years later, I came upon a book entitled Wave by Sri Lankan writer Sonali Deraniyagala. To my shock, the author was the niece of the gentleman who recounted her tale during that Colombo dinner party. Her book about finding a way to live after such unimaginable loss was the most harrowing of the many tragic stories I had heard.

Nine months after the tsunami, I left Sri Lanka and returned to Ottawa. With time, the Indian Ocean tsunami has increasingly become a distant memory. 

But every year on Boxing Day, Tom and I reflect on the display of seashells we collected on Christmas Day 2004, the day before the deadliest tsunami in recorded history raged across the Indian Ocean and swept away hundreds of thousands of lives while somehow sparing ours.

Postscript by Angela Bogdan 

I succeeded Valerie in 2006. The robust and targeted tsunami redevelopment programming she had initiated with her Canadian International Development Agency colleagues was striking. The program involved some $85 million in programming across 35 projects in partnership with local governments, NGOs and United Nations agencies. In the years to come, I “walked on Valerie’s shoulders” as I oversaw the completion of these projects, the bulk of which focussed on women’s income generation and livelihoods, maternal newborn child health care, community rehabilitation and housing. Her legacy lives on.

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