Dateline ACT

South & south east Asia/Sri Lanka - 05/05

Tsunami survivors begin to return to what's left of home

By Paul Jeffrey, ACT International

Jaffna, Sri Lanka, January 18, 2005--Mary Sriyoyogaveni isn't ready to go home yet. Sheltered in the Holy Trinity Methodist Church in Kaddaively, she is still healing from the lacerations dealt her body by the December 26 tsunami when it ripped through the coastal fishing villages that line the sea where this northern part of Sri Lanka protrudes into the Bay of Bengal. And then there are the wounds that will never heal: Sriyoyogaveni lost one daughter and two grandchildren to the waves. Another daughter is in a nearby hospital with broken legs.

A government agent came to the shelter last week and told Sriyoyogaveni and her husband, David Shanmugarajah, that it was time to move home. Yet she has no home. Besides her loved ones, the tsunami took her house, her cooking pots, her clothes, and the tools her husband used to earn a living as a painter. Three of her daughters who survived also lost their homes.

Even if her house still stood, Sriyoyogaveni is not sure she would return. "I can't look at the sea without being afraid. What if it comes again in the night?" she asked.

As Sri Lanka moves from burying the dead to rebuilding a thousand kilometers of shattered coastline, there are many who, like Sriyoyogaveni, are afraid to return to where their homes once stood. Many of them remain camped out in 442 relief camps, often located in schools the government needs for classes, though when the new school year got underway on January 10, many expected students did not show up. If they continue to be absent, many will be presumed to have died, and the body count on this island nation, which lost a higher percentage of its population than any other country, will rise even higher than the government's latest figure of 38,195 confirmed dead and 6,034 missing.

The government is also limiting where families can rebuild, effectively prohibiting construction within 100 meters of the sea. President Chandrika Kumaratunga explained the measures to Sri Lankan religious leaders during a January 4 meeting in Colombo, saying the government would build three-story apartment complexes for those left homeless by the tsunami.

In a national reconstruction plan released January 17, the government said it would build up to 15 new cities to accommodate the relocated families. The government also announced tax breaks to affected hotels, and declared that families left homeless by the disaster would get a "startup allowance" of about $50 and have any outstanding utility bills written off.

While church officials support the push to get people out of the emergency camps as soon as is practical, claiming the conditions in the shelters are particularly unhealthy for women and children, they express concern that the government's initial plan downplays cultural dynamics that should be paid attention to now, not after the fact.

"People's traditional homes are an important part of their culture, especially for the fishers whose home is closely related to where they work. This is bound to create tension between state policy and social demand, but the only way forward is through dialogue. I have the impression that this is underway, that the state will summon people, explain their position, and then listen to what they say," said the Rt. Rev. Duleep de Chickera, the Anglican bishop of Colombo.

"From a pragmatic point of view, it’s necessary that people get back to normalcy as soon as possible. But insofar as requiring people to move, I would question that. What I would really like to see is a force that can mediate in this. Perhaps the churches and civil society can play that role, to negotiate and soften any rough or hard edges that people may experience as a result of the government's decisions," the bishop said.

During the January 4 meeting, President Kumaratunga also told church leaders that the immediate need for emergency food had been largely met. But she appealed to the churches for assistance with safe drinking water and trauma counseling. Kumaratunga also appealed for help in taking care of the orphans left behind when the tsunami's killer waves receded. Sri Lanka’s churches have considerable experience in taking care of widows and orphans created by the country’s brutal two-decade-long civil war.

The Rev. Jayasiri Peiris, general secretary of the National Christian Council of Sri Lanka (NCC), said reports he had received from around the country verified that many emergency shelters had enough food on hand for the next few days, a testimony to the herculean effort that faith groups and nongovernmental organizations have made in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. During the first two weeks, the NCC, for example, dispatched 27 trucks of food and other aid from its emergency distribution center in the Methodist City Mission in Colombo, in addition to sending money to remote areas where local churches and ecumenical groups purchased food and other supplies locally.

NCC is a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT) International, a global alliance of churches and related agencies responding to disasters. On January 7, the ACT Coordinating Office issued a US$41.8 million appeal for tsunami relief and rehabilitation activities in the Indian Ocean region. In Sri Lanka, in addition to NCC, the appeal also supports relief and rehabilitation work of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India.

NCC has a long history of humanitarian and peacebuilding work, yet Peiris said the scope of the current crisis led the organization to create a new Temporary Relief Unit (TRU) to manage the massive program, which will run until the end of 2006.

"We're starting to move out of this first crisis phase and into reconstruction, trauma counseling, and livelihood generation, of working with people at a community level to help them solve their own problems and rebuild their lives," he said.

Groups like NCC have their work cut out for them if they are going to stave off a long-term economic crisis. According to a January 13 report from the Asian Development Bank, nearly 250,000 Sri Lankans will be forced into poverty by the post-tsunami economic collapse.

Yet Peiris cautioned that NCC was not interested in huge reconstruction programs just because the money may be available.

"The world is responding with generosity, but the churches and the NCC aren't interested in becoming yet another NGO. We may have access to funding now for relief work, but we must keep the spiritual and religious character of our work intact. We'll see how much we can tackle, rather than getting all the money that is available. We're trying to identify things that we can do in local areas, using not just money but the tremendous human resources that we have available, working ecumenically with other Christians and in an interfaith manner with people of other religions. We are also called to provide pastoral care to the people. Otherwise we will build all this infrastructure without building up the people," said Peiris.

A key to this approach is listening, Peiris argues. "We have to first listen to the people. They're still in trauma. We're training people to go and sit with them and just listen to their stories. And then slowly help them come out of that situation. Rather than focusing on massive projects, we're called at times to simply be with the people, showing them our solidarity," he said.

Bishop de Chickera agreed: "The church has to be open to massive programs and funding - that's going to be necessary. But we have to give this all a human face. Behind the numbers of more than 30,000 dead, we have a mother who is grieving the loss of her child. That pastoral aspect is absolutely important. You can build buildings in a few years, but dealing with that inner pain, that grief and sense of loss, the bitterness, lots of questions - all that is going to take a lifetime. I would like all true religions to keep those concerns on the table, because if we don't, who will?"

The tsunami hit all ethnic and religious groups alike, and church leaders here continue to hold out hope that the tragedy will somehow help heal the deep ethnic tensions that tear at Sri Lanka's social fabric. Indeed, in the waves' immediate wake, many divisions seemed to be forgotten as neighbor helped neighbor, regardless of ethnic or religious identity. Soldiers on each side of the war helped search for each other's bodies. Newspapers showed pictures of President Kumaratunga at a shelter smiling and shaking hands with a female Tamil fighter. The encounter was all the more significant in that it apparently was not a prearranged photo op, and the symbolism needed no interpretation - everyone in Sri Lanka knows that the president was blinded in one eye during an attack by a Tamil fighter.

Over recent days, however, old tensions have resurfaced. Tamil leaders have complained that the government is dragging its feet on aid delivery to villages controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). And the government's refusal to let United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan visit Tamil-controlled areas during a January 8-9 visit generated a strong protest, helping persuade Kumaratunga to finally grant permission for James Morris, head of the U.N.'s World Food Program, to meet with the LTTE's political chief, S.P. Thamilselvan, in the rebel-controlled town of Kilinochchi on January 16.

Peiris suggested it was time for churches to redouble their efforts at building peace.

"This is a moment to work together, when the government and the LTTE and civil society, when people of all faiths can work together to revitalize the peace movement. This can't be separated from the tsunami crisis. It's a God-given opportunity, which isn't to say that God caused the tsunami," said Peiris.

He cited the example of some Buddhist monks in a town north of the capital who showed up to clean the government hospital there, and who took food to a group of homeless Tamils. "This is an encouraging sign, because the general attitude of Buddhist monks is that they are there to receive. Yet in this moment their whole theology has changed, they've come to serve, they've crossed cultural boundaries, which is necessary if we're going to rebuild the lives of people and not just the physical infrastructure of the country," Peiris said.

Bishop de Chickera suggested the crisis would make for lasting change in the church and how it understands its mission.

"I have difficulty with reading the tsunami, as some are suggesting, as God's judgement against the victims. Whether God is saying something to the whole country, I need to reflect on that. But if God is saying something to the whole country, God is saying it at tremendous cost. And the God of love I see in Jesus was not only present with the more vulnerable, but also became vulnerable. This is a new challenge. Theology in south Asia will definitely see a paradigm shift because of the disaster," de Chickera said.