Ready to fly to new shores of hope

CHENNAI: Children who lost one or both parents to the tsunami faced a choice – to sink or soar. This is a story of three ‘tsunami girls’ – Sowmya, Meena and Tamilarasi – who chose the latter. Growing up in a govt home, the girls realised education is their only ticket to a better life.

With resilience and hard work as friends, they are now graduates looking forward to a successful career and a fulfilling life. Sowmya, 24, and Meena, 23, were four and three years old when tsunami struck. With no trace of their parents or their identities, the girls were listed among the ‘unidentified’.



Doctors determined their age through dental records. They were sent to Annai Sathya Government Children’s Home in Nagapattinam, started for tsunami-orphaned children. In the initial days and weeks some children were taken back by their parents who managed to trace them.

When nobody came for Sowmya and Meena, then Nagapattinam collector J Radhakrishnan became their godfather. The girls leaned on each other and forged a strong companionship. “Our only pleasant memory of those days was travelling some 15km to school, sometimes by walk,” says Sowmya.

“And we realised that only education and a good career would help us find a good place in society,” adds Meena. They both studied nursing. “Many people have helped me since I was a kid.

Now it’s my time to help those in need. That’s why I studied auxiliary nursing midwifery,” says Sowmya. Meena says she wants to be “an independent woman because all my life I had depended on others.

” Sowmya and Meena grew up in the orphanage till they turned 18. In 2020, a couple named M Malarvizhi and A Manivannan took them in as their foster children. Sowmya got married in 2022, and recently delivered a girl, Sara.

“I don’t have any great memories from the children’s home. We never knew what family bonding was until we met our mom. I want my daughter to have all the things I didn’t have as a child.

For that, I must have a job,” says Sowmya.Meena is getting married in February 2025. “I chose the man I am marrying because he comes from a big family that I always dreamt of living with.

My plan is to go to work a month after my wedding and in a few years, I want to adopt a child and offer help to children’s homes,” she says. Their friend Tamilarasi, now 35, had an equally rough path to success. At the age of 15, she moved to the children’s home after she lost her mother to the tsunami.

Books became her refuge. “Reading and going to school healed my wounds,” says Tamilarasi. She convinced her father and five siblings that she had to pursue higher education.

“I am sure my mom will be smiling at me from the heavens,” says the MCA graduate – the only one in her family to go to a college – who landed a job in an IT company in Chennai. Marriage and the birth of her two children brought her back to Velankanni near Nagapattinam and she took up a job at Annai Sathya Illam, which was her home for two years after the calamity. “I tell today’s residents of the children’s home not to lose hope.

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