Southland Family’s Passions Led Them to Sri Lanka

Anton Ambrose had bent down to tie his wife’s shoe when water started trickling around his feet.

The San Fernando Valley gynecologist was getting ready to leave the resort at Yala National Park in Sri Lanka with his wife, Beulah, and adult daughter, Orlantha, when the waves hit.

At first, he told friends, he thought a pipe from the hotel must have burst. Within seconds, the water was waist high.

He heard Orlantha scream. As the water pushed him away, he grabbed a tree branch, but it broke. He grasped another tree and held tight.

Those moments are all that Anton Ambrose could recount to friends after he survived the tsunami that killed tens of thousands on the shores of the Indian Ocean last weekend.

The next thing he remembers, friends said, is waking up in a hospital thinking he would be reunited with his family.

But the bodies of his 61-year-old wife and 33-year-old daughter were recovered later in the devastation left by the surging seawater.

The funeral for Beulah and Orlantha Ambrose is planned for today in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.

Family and friends in Southern California will gather for a memorial service at 8 p.m. tonight at St. Peter Chanel Catholic Church in Hawaiian Gardens.

Another Californian, Kristi Anderson, was killed at Yala.

Anderson’s body and passport were found where the destroyed resort had been, family members told Associated Press.

Anderson, 42, was a world traveler vacationing in Sri Lanka after finishing a yearlong job in India for a technology and communications firm.

“She was spectacular and brilliant,” her brother, Mike Anderson, a police officer in Scottsdale, Ariz., told Associated Press. “She had everything except 40 more years.”

State Department officials confirmed that at least 12 Americans were killed in the tsunami that followed a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in southern Asia. Nearly 77,000 people in a dozen countries are confirmed dead in the disaster.

Anton and Beulah Ambrose came to the United States from Sri Lanka more than three decades ago to make a better life for their family. He trained as a medical doctor, she as a concert-level pianist. They passed along their passions for music and altruism to their two children.

Those loves led Orlantha Ambrose to Colombo more than a year ago to teach poor children to play the violin. Her parents’ support for her dream brought them back to Sri Lanka for the holidays.

The Ambroses’ family friends, many of whom were affected by the disaster in their native country, remembered the family as tight-knit, one that uniquely blended its old and new lands.

After attending exclusive private schools in Los Angeles, Orlantha Ambrose taught kindergarten and first grade at a Los Angeles public elementary school, giving up her lunch breaks and recess periods to teach violin. Her mother, once a fellow at Trinity College of Music in London, would make the trip to Walgrove Elementary School in Mar Vista to accompany her daughter and the fledgling violinists on piano.

When her son, Cezhan, 31, played in rock bands, Beulah Ambrose became a fan. When her daughter decided to live in Colombo, Beulah and her husband set aside their concerns about safety in their homeland and supported her, both financially and emotionally, according to those who know the family.

“They were very close,” said Naomi Soto, who works in Anton Ambrose’s Northridge medical office. “They were always faxing notes back and forth to Sri Lanka. [Beulah] would fax the horoscope so Orlantha could read it.”

Cezhan was not with his family at the time of the disaster, but flew to Sri Lanka on Sunday to be with his father.

Friends said Beulah was devoted to her family, caring for her father-in-law for more than two decades at their home in Encino until his death this year at age 98. Her 91-year-old mother-in-law, who lives with the family, was staying with a relative in Southern California during the family’s Sri Lanka trip.

Beulah helped run her husband’s gynecology practice in Northridge, said June DeSilva, who met Anton Ambrose when they were students at a college in Sri Lanka.

“We are all worried about how he will cope,” she said.

If the Ambroses had not been caught in the disaster themselves, people who know them say, they would have been among the first to offer aid.

Orlantha Ambrose “felt the need to do service for others,” DeSilva said. “They all had this calling.”