S. Padma Holt's Report from Sri Lanka
posted January 11, 2005
Sri Lankans always celebrate New Years twice—once in January and then, along with south India and most of Southeast Asia, during the traditional date in April (12th or 13th). On either occasion, the New Year is regarded as an auspicious beginning and much time and energy are invested in wishing friends and relations the best with New Year greetings. This year, the tsunami took away all of the enthusiasm for and celebrations of auspiciousness that each New Year would otherwise bring. It will be years before this island nation fully recovers. The memory of the tsunami will become a major marker for generations to come.
The small city of Kandy (pop. @100,000), being in the midst of Sri Lanka’s highlands in the center of the island, appeared to me, at least on the surface, not very affected by the tsunami when I first arrived here on the morning of January 4. When I met our ISLE Program faculty from the University of Peradeniya, they seemed to be ready to jump into business right away. When I inquired about their safety and well-being, they nodded their heads as a matter of fact. Only when I asked them directly about the tsunami of the previous week would they eventually come around to the topic and begin to relate stories, some tragic and some heroic, about their relatives or friends. It soon became clear that some of our faculty also have been active in joining relief efforts to tsunami victims on both coasts of the island. Many people from all communities in Sri Lanka mobilized immediately, once the immensity of the situation was realized. The university community was just one.
As you may have learned from earlier reports, at least three of our ISLE Program faculty from the University of Peradeniya found themselves right in the middle of the tsunami when it occurred. Others, like Prof. Tudor Silva, who will be a visiting faculty at Bowdoin next semester, and Prof. P. Wickramagamage, who teaches ISLE’s environmental studies class, have lost extended family members or close friends. Four students from the University of Peradeniya are certainly lost and some fifty more are currently counted among the missing. Indeed, whatever numbers are being given in the media these days must be regarded as rough estimates—so many people are still missing. Since December 27th, the faculty from various departments in the university have collected various materials and have distributed them to relief camps. They have been holding meetings to draw up specific plans for reconstruction and rehabilitation. They are trying to put pressure on other universities to make a coordinated effort. Prof. Kapila Goonasekere, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya, has been appointed as a member of the National Advisory Committee of Disaster Relief that Sri Lankan President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga has recently established.
Since the day of tsunami, it seems that an impossible number of relief funds have been set up by NGOs, government organizations, political parties, educational institutes, and clubs. Even private individuals have started collecting funds from their US friends. Our ISLE Program women’s studies teacher, Dr. Carmen Wickramagamage of the Dept. of English at the University of Peeradeniya, has collected some money from her many friends in the US, including assistant professor of sociology at Bowdoin, Wendy Cadge. Ram Alagani, lecturer in the University of Peradeniya Geography Department and university liaison for our ISLE students, has raised a sum of $3,500 through his friends in the US. The ISLE program has begun collecting funds from its alumni with a goal of raising $50,000 in total. Bowdoin College itself has pledged $5,000 towards this amount and I am hoping that our other member institutions of the ISLE Program consortium will soon follow. There are several local relief organizations here that will receive direct assistance from us before I leave the island to return to Maine on February 15. These organizations range broadly in the services they provide: from immediate food and water relief, to care for orphaned children, to reconstruction of village infrastructure, to psychological counseling, and for assisting destitute women on the east coast in particular.
On Saturday morning, January 8, at 4 am, I joined a relief group organized by Dr. Sam Samarasinghe, the Associate Director of the International Center for Ethnic Studies and also a faculty member of Tulane University. The ICES is a think tank here in Kandy with which ISLE has been affiliated for the past 20 years. Its Executive Director is Prof. Kingsley de Silva, a noted historian who was a visiting Fulbright professor at Bowdoin during the 1985-86 academic year. Some of our ISLE Program students’ classes are held each year at ICES and we have supported the building of ICES’s excellent library that focuses on women’s as well as ethnic studies. Our students make heavy use of that library as well.
About ten of Sam’s relief group on January 2nd had visited Trincomalee in the coastal North-East of Sri Lanka to make a needs’ assessment. As requested by doctors who are working in the area, they had taken a supply of essential medicines on this visit. The Lions Club and the USAID district office in Trincomalee hosted them and took them to Kinniya and Uppuweli, small villages near Trincomalee town that are among the worst affected. There they saw the vast and thorough destruction that the tsunami has caused to the land and property and listened to harrowing tales of woe from residents, many of whom have lost their loved ones.
Based on their observations and following a discussion with their hosts, they decided to make a second relief visit to Trincomalee on Saturday, 8th January, with more supplies. I quote here from Sam’s report that we all read before making the visit:
"School supplies will be given to children from grades 1 to 3 in four schools. One school is Sinhalese, one Muslim, and two Tamil.
"Toys and materials for drawing will be given to the above children and to their younger siblings. (Sri Lanka has no resources for trauma counseling. The team observed that the children in the areas that they visited did not behave 'normally.' The usual smile that children have on their faces was gone. They looked traumatized and almost certainly are. Psychologists have advised the team that toys and drawing material may help these children to come to terms with the situation.)
"Underwear will be provided for women in three camps – one Sinhalese, one Tamil and one Muslim - that house displaced persons. (In Sri Lankan culture this is a taboo topic for public discussion. We have been told that while other items of clothing are reaching the victims, female underwear is in especially short supply.)"
Among Sam’s group of 30 people, 21 of them were members of the Kandy Lions Club, three were members of the staff of the Kandy News (the local English newspaper), while four of us, including myself, came as ICES affiliates. Lions Club members came from different walks of life, one of them being the deputy mayor of Kandy town. The majority of them were couples and a few with twenty plus year old children. We were also accompanied by a visiting scholar from Holland and a tourist from London who had been affected by the tsunami and who has since been collecting money for relief.
We drove for five hours straight to the office of USAID in Trincomalee, accompanied by the two truck loads of supplies that followed our bus. All of the refugee camps in the Trincomalee area are now run by either the army or navy of Sri Lanka. This has been an unsettled area for nearly twenty years because of the civil war and is ethnically divided roughly evenly between Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalas. At present the army is maintaining 70 camps, each of which varies tremendously in its numbers with any where between three to more than three hundred families in each. Sam had previously contacted the army to inform them what our mission would be. He found out from them that these camps now have enough medicine supplies. So, he bought some sports equipment such as cricket bats, balls, tennis rackets, balls, caroms, pin board, etc. instead. Sri Lanka Telecom employees in our group had collected school bags and gave them to Sam to distribute. Two of the Lions club members that accompanied us were SL Telecom employees.
At the USAID office, we were joined by two of the local Trincomalee Lions Club representatives who helped Sam and others to reorganize the supplies to be distributed to the first relief camp which had been set up in a Buddhist temple in Trincomalee town. The local Lions Club members had helped Sam previously in figuring out the exact number of children and women in these camps.
After the ceasefire agreement between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in February, 2003, the US embassy had decided to set up a USAID office in Trincomalee to monitor the transition of refugees from the ongoing civil war. The office was opened in June, 2003, with a two year mandate. Brenda, a graduate student from Tulane University (where Sam teaches) is heading up this office and working closely working with the Trincomalee Lions Club in organizing relief missions. She says that she represents the US tax payer and makes sure that the NGOs in the area are doing their jobs as stated. Sam’s organization is planning to collaborate with Brenda in long term reconstruction activities. How much they will be able to contribute depends on how much money they can raise. If more aid flows in, Sam would make this long-term project a reality by adopting a village and overseeing its rehabilitation---it’s school, it’s houses, infrastructure, etc. He is hoping that the USAID’s presence would also be extended for more years in the wake of tsunami disaster.
After organizing the supplies that were to be distributed in the first camp, we headed to the Jayasumanaramaya Buddhist temple. This is a camp for Sinhala tsunami survivors. It holds 340 families with a total population of 1350. Estimates in the Sri Lanka newspapers put the total number of people affected by the tsunami, in terms of loss of life or property, at about 1 million (5% of the country’s population), with some 800,000 people now homeless. There were 380 children and 440 women in this camp. Sam and other Lions Club members gathered the children and circled them under the shade of the trees in the courtyard. In a few minutes, two of the Lions Club members transformed themselves into the role of comedians to entertain the children. They imitated animals, told stories and sang songs, asking the children to join in the chorus and clap to the rhythm. I thought about the human spirit, here, how laughter and joy sometimes just have to be manufactured no matter how grave the circumstances to reassure ourselves that we are still human. Once they made sure that the children were cheered, they divided them into age groups. Toys were distributed first. Next came school bags, note books, pens and other school supplies. Sports supplies were given at the end. The public schools were scheduled to open on the following the Monday, Jan 10. But for these children, school would be in the temple premises. Throughout Sri Lanka, around 160 schools have been partially damaged or fully destroyed, according to newspaper reports.
Sam told me how distribution could get tricky and out of control if not organized properly. Local people can take control of it and then the supplies may not end up in the right hands. There’s been a lot written in the local newspapers about various distribution problems, the politics of disaster relief, and even about fraud in the name of relief. At some point, the army chief had told Sam that they would do the distribution on our behalf and that he could, therefore, relieve us from this task. Knowing the bureaucracy involved in the army handling things, Sam refused this offer politely. Earlier, we had heard complaints from tsunami survivors about the distribution (or lack thereof) of supplies.
I had some conversations here with some of the women in Sinhala. One of the Lions Club members came to my aid to help when the conversation became more complex than my Sinhala could handle. I learnt from them that they came from a fishing village named Sumedhagama where a majority were Sinhalese while Tamils and Muslims were also significant minorities. The tsunami left seven dead bodies and twenty five houses completely in ruins in their neighborhood. Soon, all of the camps’ women were gathered simultaneously on the other side of the courtyard and the underwear and other feminine needs we had brought were distributed to them by our women volunteers.
It was midday by the time we were done at the first camp. We proceeded to a nearby hotel to have our midday meal. We chose this hotel because one of the accompanying Lions Club members works as a manager of a hotel in Kandy that is part of the same chain. This hotel was by the beach so it had been signficantly affected by tsunami. The first floor had been completely inundated, but the structure had withstood the force of the tsunami. The big swimming pool and all of the furniture on the first floor had been ruined. But because this hotel is a part of a big chain, quickly things were put back together and it had already started functioning within 2 weeks after the disaster. But the faces of the workers and the few tourists who remained in the hotel appeared grave, as if they had been attending a funeral. Maybe they had.
After lunch we headed to a school in a village called Nilavelli. I made some conversations with the teachers who spoke English. They came from Trincomalee town. The school is close to the ocean. The tsunami had not only brought water but also a lot of garbage into its premises. The waterline could still seen several feet up on the walls. Nilavelli is a Tamil-speaking village. Farmers and fishermen live in this village. The majority of Hindus live in coexistence with Christian and Muslim communities. It was reported that the village lost at least 31 people. We brought school supplies for the first, second, and third graders. We had been informed that the number in these grades were 41, 58, and 63 respectively. But when we arrived in the school the numbers were much more than this. Anticipating this, we had brought more supplies. The school principal wanted to distribute the supplies himself, as he said that he doesn’t want any outsiders to get any supplies. Sam and others told him that it doesn’t matter whether the children attended this school or some other school and that we would like to distribute to everybody. Sam addressed the kids in Sinhala. For a while the principal, and later Ram Alagani, acted as interpreters from Sinhala to Tamil and English. They divided the children into groups and distributed the supplies. Meanwhile, some ten brand new brooms were brought out of the truck by the group and both the men and women in our group worked swiftly to clean up the littered school courtyard.
The chief of the Navy camp nearby had come to oversee our distribution. Previously we had taken his permission to come to the school. The navy camp was also affected by tsunami and they had lost one person when their camp was flooded out. After the distribution, the chief invited us to his camp. Sam was hesitant to accept the invitation, saying that we needed to head to two other camps before it gets dark. But the navy chief who had made arrangements for us insisted that it would take only half hour. So, we headed to his camp. The navy was busy in reconstructing the camp. Still there are signs of destruction everywhere. A dilapidated building next to the camp is now occupied by the Indian military, men who have come to help in relief work. The navy chief lauded the work of the Indian military. He sent a word to the chief of the Indian battalion to come and meet us. When I told the Navy chief that I was from India before coming to the U.S., he was excited and introduced me to the Indian Naval officer in charge. It turned out that the Indian commander was posted to the Visakhapatnam Navy, the city I came from in Andhra Pradesh. We mentioned to each other that neither of us could imagine meeting another Visakhapatnam resident in such a remote part of a foreign country in such circumstances. The Indian military has brought a lot of medicine supplies and doctors with them. That’s the reason we were asked not to bring any medicines.
By the time we headed to Uppuweli and Kinniya camps, it was late afternoon. We drove directly to a Muslim school called Abdul Mazeed Vidyalayam. When we got out we could smell the gravity of what had been the situation at this site. It smelled like rotting flesh. Broken boats and other types of trash were littered all over the expansive plain around the school. Some tied handkerchiefs around their noses. I didn’t get to talk directly to anybody at this place and hence didn’t hear about the death toll. But from what I overheard, it seems that the dead bodies still keep appearing as they wash ashore. It seems that there is no clear count of victims to be known. When we finished the distribution, we proceeded to Kinniya, the gravest of all of the sites we had visited so far. A ferry connects Kinniya with Uppuweli The big ferry that once hauled vehicles, people, beasts, and goods had been washed away. Instead, now a small ferry with a modest engine is plying people from one end to other. It was very slow and accommodated only two vehicles each time. So, there was quite a traffic jam with vehicles lined up on either side of the bank. It was very ramshackle.
We knew that Kofi Annan of the U.N. was visiting these two sites that afternoon. We thought we were going to bump into him. Because we were running late we missed him by an hour or two. We waited patiently for our turn to cross while watching the daylight slipping by. When our turn came we had to go in three shifts, which meant we waited on the other side as well. By the time we finally reached the camp, there was very little light left. But the word got around that the trucks had arrived. Many desperate looking people started gathering to receive supplies. But Sam decided not to distribute them that evening as it was difficult to determine to whom we were handing the supplies amidst the confusion. Instead, he asked the two local Trincomalee Lions Club members to distribute the supplies the next morning. This decision was a difficult one, as the gathering swell of people weren’t convinced by Sam’s plan and didn’t want to see the trucks go back. We couldn’t go back immediately either, as we had to wait a long time for our turn to cross the bay. But it did give me a chance to speak with local youth about the destruction in this Muslim village. The village has water on its three sides. When the water came on all three sides it washed away ninety percent of the village. The local hospital was destroyed beyond repair. We heard that the whole maternity ward was washed away with patients in it. I was sorry that I couldn’t take good pictures at this site as it grew dark. The destruction is impossible to describe. The local youth could speak some English. One of the youth I spoke to said that his house was safe because it was in the middle of the narrow strip of land where the water didn’t reach. But he showed me his scraped chin and then pointed towards the other side of the road saying that his friend’s house had been washed away and that all of his family members were dead. Houses of his relatives had also been destroyed and many were missing. Another person told me that they recovered more than 700 bodies on the evening of tsunami itself and buried them in a mass grave constructed very quickly for that purpose on the same day. Islamic religion insists that the dead should be buried before sunset on the same day they have died.
We returned home very somber. There were two ways that we could take. The quickest route conventionally was by land and could have spared us a lot of waiting time at the ferry. But that route, we learned, is controlled by the LTTE during night time and we didn’t want to tempt fate and find ourselves, a predominantly Sinhala group, in some kind of potential trouble or confusion. So, we took the long way by ferry instead eventually stopping off in Habarana for a very late dinner around 11 PM before arriving back in Kandy at 3 AM the next morning, 23 hours after we had first departed.
There is a common Sinhala saying that one hears in moments of frustration: "moneva kerene da?" ("what to do?"). We had done but a little, and it seems unimaginable to understand how much remains to be done.
— Sree Padma Holt
Administrative Director, ISLE Program
Lecturer in Asian Studies, Bowdoin College
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