Sri Lankan Resilience Remembered

"We went down miles and miles and miles of road. There was destruction everywhere. And every time we turned off, literally, there was another story."

And The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, who just returned from touring the tsunami zone, says what unfolded before his eyes in Sri Lanka was often remarkable.

"Every single day, the conditions along the beach there, for miles around in every direction, got a little bit better, because individuals were out working so hard, around the clock.

"And the thing I'll never forget is these poorest of poor people knocking the mortar off, and the bricks from their brokekn homes, in stacks, and the ceiling tiles, in stacks, ready to rebuild their lives."
In Unawatuna, a beach town that a travel magazine once described as one of the best in the world, he met a woman named Vindia and her family. They'd made a four-hour car trip so they could see the place where her cousin had died in the tsunami.
"I wanted to see how the wave was…why certain spots got devastated so badly and other parts were saved," she told Smith.

Vindia's cousin, her husband and two small children had rented a house for the Christmas holiday. The children survived by climbing into a treehouse but, Vindia says, the adults stayed downstairs and were washed away.

And while still shaken, Vindia says she is at peace with the loss of someone she loved so much.

The evening Smith met her, a group of Buddhist priests arrived in Unawatuna to offer prayers. The many who died there never received a proper funeral. There just wasn't time. So this night, the priests would offer prayers for the dead.

But prayers were offered for the living, too; that miseries of the living might soon be lifted. A priest told Smith they would pray all night.

They would pray until sunrise.

Back in New York, Smith told his fellow co-anchors, "One of the things that was most interesting, culturally, is that Buddhism has a whole different view of life and death: that death is a part of life. And while Vindia was shaken, she was not in a state of uncontrollable grief."