Reports from the Ground

Amita Parashar from Sri Lanka

Refugee tents still cover the towns around Galle, Sri Lanka. For the seven months since the December tsunami, families have been living without running water or electricity, packed into tents as small as those many Americans use for a weekend camping trip. Relief efforts have provided food and disease prevention for day-to-day survival, but these band-aid approaches are not enough to ensure the area’s revitalization.

A fishing city on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, Galle is about 60 miles from Colombo, a journey that takes about five hours by minibus. Fishermen sell fresh tuna from their boats. The premier shopping center in town, P & J City, boasts a supermarket the size of an American drugstore and is surrounded with fruit and clothing stalls.

Galle is a growing area with amazing resources, trying to rebuild to the days when American, European and other tourists vacationed here. Last December 26th, nine feet of water covered the town in a matter of minutes, and when the sea receded, it took along entire buildings, boats, lives, and livelihoods.

While relief aid continues to pour in, reconstruction is slow and often ineffective. Corps of do-gooder ex-hippies, ex-pats, and college students, myself included, are volunteering physical capital. We spend our "vacations" on a construction site with local skilled and unskilled workers who earn four dollars a day for their services. We hand-mix paint and concrete and carry raw materials pan by pan, inefficiency at its best.

There are no cement mixers or even a generator for the ten-house building project. At first, we assume that limited items are available in this small city, until we pass an industrial supply factory displaying large cement mixers. Cost doesn’t seem to be the issue though; offers by volunteers to buy generators have been turned down.

We dilute paint and use dust brushes to slap it onto the interior and exterior of houses in three coats. Maybe they just paint differently here, we think. But when it’s time to stain the wood, real paint brushes appear as if by magic. Cement mixers and paint rollers would have taken days off the project.

We volunteers tell ourselves that building 10 houses is better than none. Right? Wrong. Aid organizations need to evaluate their current operations and start providing more efficient reconstructive help.

More than six months after the disaster we must stop using temporary solutions and start creating lasting change. The key to rebuilding Sri Lanka is creating infrastructure. Patchwork relief efforts will never be enough because they are not sustainable. Of course, immediate food, water, shelter and health care were vitally important, but the focus must shift to development.

If Sri Lanka wants to use its potential to start on the road to self sufficiency, more sustainable resources are needed. Promote Sri Lankan businesses, increase tourism, build schools and hospitals—whatever the country needs to sustain itself.

Those of us who are moved to help with this rebuilding must think of the most effective ways to create such change. We must hold aid organizations accountable for how they use our donations and make sure we, as donors, agree with that purpose. A ten-minute Internet search can help match an organization’s mission with its donor to ensure we are supporting viable projects.

Instead of dialing the first number that comes across the evening news the next time we are motivated to respond to a disaster, we must own our global responsibility to rebuild in the most effective way possible.

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When she returns from Sri Lanka, Los Alamitos resident Amita Parashar will be a senior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts where she is majoring in English. Amita Parashar '06 is one of 10 Wellesley students spending part of the summer in Sri Lanka on tsunami relief and rebuilding efforts. She wrote this column for The Orange County Register, her local paper.

Photo Caption: Volunteers Katie Ellis and Jordan Korth play a game with the girls of Sakhti Girls Home in Kokkadicholai, Sri Lanka.

Katie Ellis from Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

Lightning flashes ominously overhead as local residents and my fellow volunteers wait patiently in the dark heat of eastern Sri Lanka. The gunshots from an army camp to the south sound more ominous than the threatening storm. Will it be tonight that local rebels, dubbed the Tamil Tigers, will restart their war, breaking their recent cease fire and renewing their 20-year war with the Sri Lankan government? Despite these threats and the continuing devastation wrought by last December’s tsunami, the moods among my new friends are still bright. In this war-torn, disaster-stricken land, a smiling face is never hard to find.

The volunteers, myself included, who are spending part of our summer vacation on rebuilding efforts, start with Arudpany children’s home, a two-building center that houses more than 50 children. The word “orphan” cannot always be applied to the residents of these homes; many are from families too poor to feed and educate their children. The tsunami struck this home hard, destroying their study hall, carrying off livestock and gardens, and severely flooding the main hall. For several months after the disaster, the children and several teachers lived in a local pastor’s tiny home, waiting for the day when they could return to their own meager home.

A ferry ride away is the Sakhti Girls Home in Kokkadicholai, located deep into territory controlled by the Tamil separatists. These 60 girls live in a single-family home, and the sight of a visitor brings them all running to proudly show off their songs and dances. Although the home cannot afford an English tutor for the girls, one ambitious eleven-year old has reached an astonishing level of fluency by diligently studying the dictionary each night before bed. The girls’ energy and enthusiasm while playing “Duck, Duck, Chicken” (there is no equivalent Tamil word for “goose”) far exceeded that of the volunteers who taught them the game.

Little of the billions of dollars of relief money has reached this part of the country. More than six months after the tsunami, people still sleep under trees or in houses built of straw sleeping mats, waiting patiently for the government compensation to build a new house. Rubbish lines the streets, which are punctuated by black water tanks, the only source of clean drinking water the people can afford.

Yet despite the upheaval, a remarkable annual pilgrimage continues, a 60-day walk followed by a multi-faith festival, a living symbol of the faith people have that life will go, must go, on.

Newark native Katie Ellis is spending the summer in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, an area devastated by last December’s tsunami. Her volunteer efforts are centered on helping to rebuild children’s homes (orphanages) as well as several small building and livelihood regeneration projects. Ellis graduated from the Sanford School in 2003 and is the daughter of David and Patricia Ellis of Newark. In the fall, she will begin her junior year at Wellesley College, a women’s college near Boston, where she is majoring in international relations.

Tsunami Travel Report from Indonesia, February 2005
Robin Lush, daughter of Barbara Lush, Wellesley College, Office of Resources

On December 26, 2004, I, along with the rest of the world, sat and listened to the news about the tsunami washing away hundreds of miles of oceanfront property in numerous countries throughout Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, property was not the greatest tragedy of that natural disaster. Many tens of thousands of lives were lost in nearly a dozen countries. The hardest hit area was Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra Island in Indonesia.

By the morning of December 27, I decided that I could not sit idly by on the other side of the world and wonder if my donation would help make a difference. I knew that my physical labor and active participation would be much more useful than any monetary contribution I could make. Within the week, I had spoken to the owners of the 40 person insurance brokerage firm at which I work to see if they would be willing to pay for my flights to and from Indonesia. They agreed. Contributions from friends, family, and colleagues paid for the remaining expenses that I would incur. I then sought to find an organization with which I could work so that my skills would be most efficiently utilized.

Prior to my joining the insurance industry eight years ago, I worked in a variety of capacities in the field of human services. I had experience in crisis counseling, building homes in developing countries, donation solicitation, and conducting outreach to the homeless. I developed skills that would be useful in a situation such as this.

With the assistance Melissa Hawkins at the Center for Work and Service and Professor Christopher Candland of the Department of Political Science, I found a volunteer placement at a Jakarta based organization called Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia (KPI). They initially thought that my skills would be best used in providing crisis counseling to the women and children in the refugee camps in Banda Aceh. Upon my arrival, however, it was determined that I would help with food preparation and the distribution of supplies to the various refugee camps because KPI could not spare a full-time translator, which would have allowed me to provide crisis counseling.

I spent two weeks in February working alongside approximately 15 volunteers from KPI, all of whom showed a great deal of commitment to the cause at hand. We served food to 1,500 refugees a day and distributed baby food, donated clothing, and whatever supplies we could secure through KPI’s connections with various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the city.

While this trip was very worthwhile for me and hopefully those I served, the experience was definitely not for the faint of heart. We take a great deal for granted in the United States and despite my previous trips to developing countries, it was always challenging for me to deal with unsanitary food prep/storage and the cold dirty well water that was used to wash everything. Many places, including this section of Aceh Province, don’t have the convenience of hot running water, refrigeration, flushing toilets, and other sanitation methods that we take for granted.

The devastation was far worse than I could have imagined and it will likely take some time for me to reconcile this in my heart and mind. The Indonesian people were conflicted about whether they thought the tsunami was an act of God (Allah) or Mother Nature just exerting her force. Despite the massive efforts to rebuild villages and communities, many people lost several generations of family on December 26, 2004, and the aftershocks that continue to strike the Island of Sumatra are a constant reminder of this tragedy.

UN News Centre