To provide immediate relief clean water, a tent is straightforward enough. To figure out whats appropriate as the next level of help involves getting closer
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Hambantota after tsunami © Peter Armstrong
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Tsunami relief aid has been pouring in to Sri Lanka since 26th December 2004. Has it been spent wisely? In Colombo, I listened to fervent urban arguments. The foreigners have been wonderful. No, they have been corrupting the local economy. Thank goodness trauma counsellors have arrived. No, forget the psychobabble and get on with the practicalities. The Sri Lankan government has responded brilliantly. No, it has been rubbish. The fact that these opinions were so sweepingly contradictory rarely dampened their certitude.
But after a while, a grudging and positive consensus emerges. No-one has starved because of the tsunami. No-one has died of cholera. Children are back in school. All this in six weeks, in a country torn by civil war for half a century. It is surely a remarkable achievement. The wilder grumblings begin to sound a bit like something from Monty Pythons What did the Romans ever do for us? sketch.
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Sri Lankan children in tsunami camp © Peter Armstrong
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More troubling, however, is the next phase, when the immediate and relatively straightforward needs of disaster relief are replaced by the demands of long term rehabilitation, which are both subtler and tougher. How, for instance, to find suitable homes for thousands of children orphaned in an instant, as one mighty blow from the tsunami parted them from their parents? The government hurriedly offered the children to their relatives, with a Rs 5,000 handout towards child support. Simple. Problem solved.
Really? No. Problem not solved; problem compounded. Rs.5,000 is only around £25, and may have seemed a modest enough sum to the governing classes. It wouldnt buy a nights bed (without breakfast) at Colombos Mt. Lavinia Hotel.
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bogus relatives attracted by the cash materialized to spirit the traumatized children away
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But it is a fortune for many thousands of Sri Lankans, and bogus relatives attracted by the cash materialized to spirit the traumatized children away. Even some of the (possibly) genuine relatives were far from suitable guardians. One uncle came and took away Rs 20,000 and four children, I was told. Later, they found he had eight children shoved into a tiny shack while he was fully drunk. The government is still unraveling the dire consequences of its hasty solution.
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Hambantota destroyed by tsunami © Peter Armstrong
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There is a lot for the well-heeled to learn. Listening to survivors in the southern city of Hambantota was an education. What did they most need? A copy of a drivers license. A pension book. It would never have crossed my mind, but for thousands of people, copies of identification documents are suddenly essential. A father needs his identity card to prove his children belong to him and not to a fake relative. A mother needs hers to claim grants for medicine.
The list goes on. A fisherman needs his to claim a grant for boat-repairs. A new widow needs her marriage certificate and her husbands pension and employment certificates to access funds in his name. A family whose home is rubble needs a copy of their land deed to stake their claim.
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Tsunami wreckage in Sri Lanka © Peter Armstrong
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But extracting documents out of the bureaucratic machine is a nightmare for anyone and the poorer and more traumatized you are, the worse your chances. Shevon Gooneratne works with the Legal Services arm of the Sarvodaya Movement, the islands most widespread NGO network, operating in 12,000 of Sri Lanka s 24,000 villages. He wants to build a network of Help Desk Officers serving all the tsunami affected districts of Sri Lanka, providing sturdy and tenacious help to chase the documents through the Kafkaesque corridors, mobilizing large groups of local volunteers to do any extra legwork. We will not just to start the process, says Gooneratne, determinedly. We will make sure it is concluded.
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Jesmina lost 2 children in tsunami © Peter Armstrong
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Help for individuals given by Sarvodaya includes psychological help, sorely needed. I observed, but could not bear to intrude on, a broken woman sitting in front of her tent, staring at nothing, oblivious of the people around, her face wet with tears. Six weeks after the tsunami, she was still speechless, frozen by shock. She had been standing in the sea bathing her two small children when the wave came. She grabbed one toddler in each hand but the wave was stronger than their handholds, and both children were snatched away, never to be seen again. Thats the story I was told. She looked like she had been re-living that unbelievable moment over and over again, every moment of every day of the past fifty days, unable to take it in that such an unbearable, unbelievable thing, could have happened.
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Hambantota tsunami survivor © Peter Armstrong
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Psychological support is needed not only for individuals but for whole communities, to help them support each other without exclusion, in a spirit of compassion. The danger is that, in a time of stress, a particular ethnic or religious group could be scapegoated but mercifully that does not yet seem to have happened. But some individuals have been scapegoated. With grim irony, this kind of irrational blame seems to have fallen on the most vulnerable of all the victims: the people lost at sea, or those who loved them. They become the villains who deserved to suffer.
Can anyone bring themselves to demonise another mourning a lost parent, child or partner? It seems we can. One young woman had searched fruitlessly for her husband after the tsunami struck. She was four months pregnant and desperate. Her superstitious neighbours told her that his death had been caused by her bad character. This accusation was the final blow: the despairing girl killed herself by swallowing broken glass.
You may shake your head in disbelief. How could anyone be so cruel to this poor young widow? Sadly, there are some whose theology leads them to
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By this merciless logic, those who were the hardest hit by the tsunami must have been the wickedest of all
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believe that anything that happens to a person reveals divine judgement; everything is an instant litmus test of the individuals purity or sinfulness. So any misfortune is attracted to them through their own supposed wickedness. By this merciless logic, those who were the hardest hit by the tsunami must have been the wickedest of all. It takes blaming the victim to a new low.
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Sri Lankan house wrecked by tsunami © Peter Armstrong
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Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon. They call it splitting: when a community splits itself in two, with the self-styled good part projecting its deepest shadows - its fear and violence - onto another part of the community, which they now see through the shadowy haze as bad. The bad part then is judged to deserve all it gets; indeed, to be best expunged altogether. We saw the phenomenon in the anti-semitism of Nazi Germany and the apartheid of the old South Africa. It surrounds us every day still. Racism, sexism, homophobia, classism: we live in a thick, pallid, choking fog of bigotry and fear. Its not really surprising it should reassert itself in Sri Lankan villages after a catastrophic tsunami.
Sarvodayas distinguished founder, Dr A.T. Ariyaratne (Ari) underlined the point. Everyone thinks we need to build houses, he told me. But we need to build communities, not just houses.
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Sarvodaya volunteers in tsunami camps © Peter Armstrong
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He is talking about everything that puts a community with a heart and soul back together, on every level: from bricks and mortar to compassionate psycho-spiritual help. Individual homes need to be re-built, he says, around community-creating buildings like schools, shops, mosques and temples. Sarvodayas daycare centres are doing their bit, helping traumatized, orphaned children, withdrawn inside themselves, to come out and play with other children again. And Sarvodayas Peace Centre is holding interfaith sessions, to help ensure that the grieving, frightened communities dont split along sectarian lines, with one faith group turning against another.
So a great deal of wise and compassion-led work is going on, both practical and subtle, to heal wounded communities, where there could have been just blame and division and redoubled misery. Lessons worth learning, everywhere.
Links:
Sarvodaya
OneWorld Sri Lanka Guide
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