A local family's brush with death

It was 9:15 a.m. on Dec. 27. Lisa Dobbs waded back to the island where she was vacationing. All of the sudden, she noticed that the usually ankle-deep water was up to her knees. She looked ahead to the island, and it seemed unusually far away. She turned her head to look back at the beach, but it wasn't there anymore. The water was up to her chest.

Lisa Dobbs, her husband and their three children, who live in Bethesda, Maryland, had been spending the winter holidays on Taprobane, a private island off the coast of Sri Lanka owned by brother-in-law, Geoffrey Dobbs. The family was supposed to attend a wedding, but because of the tsunami, the wedding never took place.

Struggling in chaos

Lisa Dobbs tried to swim for the island but found herself accelerating back toward the coast on a wall of water. A Sri Lankan man in a boat held out his hand to grab her, but she was swept away. With a "sudden burst," Lisa Dobbs began her "underwater odyssey." "All I could hear was the sound of cracking wood," she recalls, remembering the beautiful, long, painted fishing boats called catamarans being smashed against the trees.

Instinctively, Lisa Dobbs reached out for anything she could grab onto and miraculously found a taut rope. "I was hoping against all hope that I didn't lose it," she says. Lisa Dobbs followed the rope to a tree and climbed above the torrent, although she had been badly bruised and cut. Within minutes, the waters calmed, and then, as suddenly as they had risen, the waters sped out to sea, leaving the entire bay dry. Surveying the devastation, Lisa Dobbs noticed someone clinging to a tree next to a house that had been completely destroyed.

Life amidst disaster

After the waters receded, Lisa Dobbs walked back to Taprobane. The entrance had been completely destroyed, and five servants had to pull her up over the rocks. Suddenly, the water came rushing back into the bay, "screaming like a freight train" and continued to go in and out, rising less and less each time.

The family's house on top of the island was high enough above the water that Lisa Dobbs' daughter, Alex Dobbs, a junior at Walt Whitman High School, slept through the first wave. "It was only a week ago [on Dec. 27], but it feels like months ago," recalls Alex Dobbs.

There was no refrigeration on the island, and for two days, the family ate only rice and bread. All Lisa Dobbs had available to treat herself was a bottle of peroxide, which she kept pouring over her wounds. On the third day after the tsunami, the family set out for the nearby city of Galle, where people came up to Alex Dobbs begging for food, water and clothing. "All the buildings were just sticks in the street," she says. "It was just unbelievably sad, unbelievable devastation."

After a day and a half in a hotel in Galle, the family left for Colombo to catch a plane back home. The streets were so chaotic that it took "eight hours to go 80 miles." In addition, everyone had to hold handkerchiefs over their noses. "The stench of decay was so horrid," says Lisa Dobbs. She especially remembers the chaos in the streets. There were "two, three, four people on a bicycle, railroads twisted like garbage-bag ties, cars twisted like rags, busses on end, huge great sharks dead on the road and people carrying coffins."

Finally, at 1 a.m., the family flew from Colombo to Bangkok to Hong Kong to Vancouver to New York to Washington, D.C. - over 30 hours of travel - not having showered since the tsunami.

Reconstruction

Now, looking at Lisa Dobbs, showered, professionally dressed, sitting in a Bethesda Starbucks, the average patron would never suspect that she had been swimming for her life in one of the world's greatest natural disasters. "It makes you realize how indiscriminate something like this is," she says. "I lived because I'm lucky." She remembers telling her children over and over, "You don't know how close you came to becoming orphans."

Lisa Dobbs' worry now is that small coastal communities that may not receive aid. Geoffrey Dobbs is in the middle of surveying small fishing towns up and down the coast trying to find where funding is most needed. The family is trying to raise money and to create a tax-deductible relief fund. "We won't want any of this going anywhere but to the people," says Lisa Dobbs. She also hopes to fund educational efforts to help prepare for another tsunami. "Extraordinarily, Sri Lankans don't seem to know how to swim at all," she says.

Alex Dobbs, too, is doing her part to raise money for the relief effort. She is working with the SGA at Whitman to raise money to be donated to adoptsrilanka.com, and she hopes to start selling bracelets similar to the "Livestrong" bracelets.

Returning to normal life after experiencing such a tragedy is "surreal," says Lisa Dobbs. "To come back to Bethesda and talk about what people in Bethesda talk about is just weird," she says. However, she is glad to see so much support from the community back home. "People have just been fabulous," she says with a smile.

Alex Dobbs has also had trouble adjusting to life back home and admits that the chaos she witnessed has made her a calmer person. "Everything here seems so trivial," she says. "I'm having trouble putting things back into perspective." Alex Dobbs adds that people often ask her what it was like to be among such destruction. "You can't understand it until you've experienced something like that," she says sincerely.

Lisa Dobbs' husband, The Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, was also swimming during the tsunami. Read his account, "It Seemed Like a Scene from the Bible," at washingtonpost.com.