Tsunami aid trip changed man’s life

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Charlie Hargrove was well tanned and a few pounds lighter after returning from more than a month of hard labor in tsunami-battered Sri Lanka.

Michael O’Leary / The Herald Charlie Hargrove says tsunami-ravaged areas in south Asia still need a lot of help.

But when the Lake Stevens man arrived home a little more than a week ago, he didn’t just look different. He was different.

In his bag was one of the reasons why.

Hargrove’s lone keepsake from his trip is an eerie one – a blue paperback book. The cover and spine are ripped and wrinkled, the back is caked with mud, and it smells like a dank basement.

It’s a ninth-grade social studies book. Hargrove found it while helping the locals dig out a rubble-filled school.

“It’s still wet,” Hargrove said, flipping through the textbook’s swollen pages. “Five weeks later, and it’s still wet.”

He just knew

The day after Christmas, the Lake Stevens man watched news reports showing giant waves battering helpless southeast Asians, killing more than 162,000 and wreaking a havoc the likes of which he had never seen before.

By day’s end, the self-employed contractor had determined to go there and help. He didn’t know why, just that he had to make the trip.

Before that day, Hargrove couldn’t have found Sri Lanka on a map. Now, he has friends there, and he can greet them and ask for water in Sinhala, the country’s official language.

Hargrove was in no way prepared for international travel, with no passport and no inoculations. With the help of his wife, Rhonda, and daughter, Joleen Runnels, he took four days to prepare for a trip that normally would have taken weeks to arrange.

On the plane ride over, Hargrove was anxious. What would he find, and would he find a way to help?

“I had nothing but question marks in front of me,” he said. “On the way home, I had nothing but exclamation points in front of me.”

He arrived in Sri Lanka a week after the tsunami hit.

“I know now why I was supposed to go,” Hargrove said. “I think it was so I could come back here and talk about it.”

When he landed in the Sri Lanka capital of Colombo, he was unsure of where he would eat or sleep. He was armed only with his hiking backpack and the name and number of a local church.

The name came from Becky Fernando, an Arlington woman who, after reading about his travel plans in The Herald, called Hargrove the day he left. Fernando said she was a missionary in Sri Lanka for 15 years, and told him to contact the People’s Church Assembly of God.

Soon, he would spend all day, every day working with the church to help the island’s residents clean up the destruction one piece at a time.

The first two weeks he spent on the west side of the island near the village of Kalutara. He bunked down on the church office floor in his sleeping bag. Once he awoke to find a scorpion near his bed. Every morning he awoke to a chattering concerto of tropical birds.

After breakfast, the workers would divide into teams according to duty. Sometimes, Hargrove would work for days on a team where no one else spoke English.

Hargrove worked with one team distributing essential supplies – food, clothing, kitchen tools and fabric. He helped build temporary shelters and bathrooms. He removed debris from homes, salvaging and stacking some of the materials for people to use when rebuilding.

“A board 3 feet long was a treasure,” he said.

He worked on a team that traveled from well to well, removing debris, pumping out salt water and scrubbing the well clean.

The food – a lot of curry, rice, fish, chicken and vegetables – was eaten without utensils and also presented a challenge.

“You can’t see flames on it, but it was very, very hot,” he said. “Normally, I don’t eat spicy anything.”

The locals must have sensed the American had a mild palate. Sometimes, the work camp cooks would fix him something special. One morning, they heated him a can of baked beans.

Later, as he worked in more tourist-oriented areas, he ran into other Americans. He even met someone from Idaho who had called Hargrove’s family for advice before deciding to follow in his footsteps of making a solo help mission.

Unimaginable damage

Hargrove later worked on the harder-hit east side of the island, where the water was “as high as the palm trees when it came through.”

Most of the people he met were still in shock.

“They were so happy to have someone come and help them. It was like it kind of shook them out of something,” he said.

It was there that Hargrove helped build a roof for a bricklayer who had lost one of his two daughters in the tsunami. The other had been in the hospital ever since with a “disturbance in her mind,” the man told him.

One young boy told him about being “pulled to the middle of the ocean, then returned to the middle of the road.”

Hargrove brought home 10 rolls of film. When he had them developed, he found that most of the pictures looked about the same: Palm trees stretch in every direction, and the ground below them is covered with piles of bricks, clothing, pieces of wood and concrete.

“It’s hard to describe it, other than an explosion of some sort,” Hargrove said.

The unprecedented amount of money and supplies from around the world didn’t always seem to make it to where it was needed, including the west coast of Sri Lanka, he said. There, he found that many people had no water, no food, no shelter and no help in sight.

“The day before I left, there were still people on the west side who were crying and hungry and had no food. I still think about them.”

Because of the work he saw People’s Church doing, Hargrove gave the $7,800 he and his church back home had raised.

Hargrove thinks about the days ahead for his new friends in Sri Lanka. Unlike him, they couldn’t board a plane after four weeks of exhaustive work and leave.

“For me, leaving was kind of like an escape,” he said. “They have no escape.”

He’s worried that the rest of the world’s attention span, particularly in the United States, will wear out before people’s needs are met.

“There is so much left to be done,” he said.

Though he spent weeks working in the sun and rain, in many ways, Hargrove’s work is just beginning. “It was an experience I’ll never forget,” he said. “I’d like it if nobody else would forget it, either.”

Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@heraldnet.com.