Charlotte shares her experience of creating a project to help small businesses get re-started in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. March 2005
Nandikka points along the front of the concrete square which was once her home and clothes shop. The family’s allocated tent is pitched in the middle of it. ‘He helped me with the sweeping. He lined our shoes up here,’ she says, referring to her four year old son who died in the tsunami.
I was in Sri Lanka for 6 months, working at an elephant sanctuary and teaching English before the tsunami hit. I left before Christmas, but flew back on the 12th of January. I had no specific plan, but a desire to help and some donations from friends and family. I headed to Unawatuna, a tsunami-struck village on the South coast where I knew people.
‘It is because I did something wrong before,’ Nandikka says. She can’t say what it was that she did wrong, only that she must have done something or her son would still be alive. She doesn’t know whether her punishable behaviour occurred in this life or a previous one. Her twelve year old daughter was the one to find his body, where the sea discarded it. I wonder if she also feels a sense of responsibility for her brother’s death. The father doesn’t speak, and won’t meet my eye.
The tsunami seems to be connected in people’s minds with the long-term erosion of the coastline and coral reefs. ‘The beach has got shorter in the last ten years,’ a resident European tells me. ‘The buildings on the beach have changed the tides.’ I ask him in what way this is relevant to the tsunami and he admits that it isn’t directly related, but claims that it is connected, expressing a view that I hear many times afterwards: that nature is taking its revenge for the building on the sand and the sewage dumped into the sea. Another man tells me that in the first few hours after the wave came, the villagers didn’t realise that the damage extended all the way round the coast, and blamed a local guy for opening his disco on a Poya day (full moon day, which is holy to Buddhists).
The government line appears to add credence to the view of moral responsibility for the disaster. Since the tsunami they have introduced a ban on building within 100 metres of the coast. They have been threatening to do so for years but have chosen now to enforce it. Not only have the survivors lost members of their family, their businesses and their houses, they are to lose their land as well. The policy has a feel of ‘I-told-you-so’ as if people invited the disaster upon themselves. It has thrown them into a state of apathy. They do not wish to rebuild their houses if their houses are going to be cleared by the government, but neither do they wish to move; to a proposed inland estate of apartment blocks. As a seafront restaurant owner put it: ‘we were born with our feet in the sand.’
One woman told me that although her family had survived and her house was intact, she wished she had died. The tsunami carried away her cooker and pots and pans. Previously she had run cookery classes for tourists. The next day I tentatively suggested that if I bought her a new cooker, she could teach me to cook. She nearly exploded with gratitude. I was also pleased. I had found a structure for giving aid that was both motivational and productive, healing and effective in the long-term. We went shopping and she became immersed in testing coconut graters and other unusual contraptions that I did not recognise. She was a strict cookery teacher. Her brother offered to provide music as we worked. He and his friend sang and drummed, but I got told off if I gave them any attention because I wasn’t concentrating on cooking. This became a common experience as people embarked on their work again: the tables turned and I was no longer in charge.
In that first month I assisted seventeen businesses back onto their feet. I gave myself some basic guidelines: I would not give cash and I would only help those who were willing to help themselves. This may sound harsh but there seems to be a culture of dependency in Sri Lanka, which got far worse after the tsunami. I was willing to help, but only if there was input from the recipient. A joint effort was far more productive and therapeutic than simple charity: it strengthened people’s confidence and self-respect. My final rule was that anything bought for a business should be portable. No money would be spent on re-building. If necessary, businesses could be run from a moveable structure –for instance a trolley-shop. This was to avoid coming into conflict with the 100-metre rule, and to protect myself from involvement in people’s living situations. I wasn’t there to give pity, but to give respect. There was so much that needed doing. I had to retain a narrow focus in order not to get distracted or depressed, or to find myself at the brunt of people’s anger and distress.
After some groundwork, quietly cross-checking an individual’s apparent situation and means and then ascertaining their willingness to work, I took them shopping. It was necessary to ensure that the money was spent on what we had agreed upon: alcoholism was prevalent in Sri Lanka before the disaster and more so afterwards with such profound shock and grief. Initially I worried that the shopping trips were a waste of my time, preventing me from getting to as many people as I wanted to, but actually they were fundamental. It was each person’s chance to be the focus of someone’s attention, to tell their story and receive some much-needed support. Once their enterprise was open I made sure other volunteers knew of it. The target market was no longer tourists, as there weren’t any. But there was a market in the huge number of volunteers who were now present.
I dropped by each business regularly, expressing how impressed I was at the work they were doing and how good the place was looking. I bought their produce. Eating my way around the village, buying jewellery and clothing was all part of the job. I bought wooden mobiles from a carvings shop, (once they had been cleaned of sand and salt), and donated them to the local orphanage. I commissioned new toys for devastated play-schools from a carpenter. I was given a mucky tsunami-surviving wooden Buddha, which I was instructed not to clean, as a thank you gift. Everything was tsunami. Tsunami jewellery, tsunami cookery. The word tsunami was thrown into music, the way people might shout ‘in the house!’ Someone’s ex-wife was described as a tsunami.
I was warned against helping the owner of a bakery; it was rumoured that he had spent money donated by another tourist on drink. But his business stood a good chance of success: there were a lot of people around who could pay for their lunch and there was nowhere local to get it. He cleaned up the shop and rebuilt the outside wall before I would consider helping him financially. Motivation proved, we bought a cooker and some brightly coloured table cloths. I reflected, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that helping a drinker was really a positive move. Any money he earned was likely to circulate the local economy, supporting the bar and small shops that were tentatively resurfacing.
I met Nandikka, the seamstress who lost her four year old son, on the evening of the one month anniversary of the tsunami. She had written her son’s name in candles. Bizarrely, his name meant ‘sea’ in Sinhala. I also lit lamps for the anniversary. There were forty thousand laid out across the village. They were floated out to sea in coconut shells and plastic bottles. It was an incredible sight. A local restaurant owner provided the clay pots for the lamps and enough coconut oil to keep them burning all night, but a few villagers took a load of oil up the mountain to sell, so not all the lamps could burn all night. I drifted into philosophical thoughts, wondering whether this could be the reason that some people live and some die- the lamps that stayed alight were the survivors. It had nothing to do with being good or bad, just the randomness of who kept which candles burning. It was difficult to make sense of any of it. It seemed as likely as the randomness of being judged and having your four year old child killed for something he hadn’t done, and perhaps you hadn’t either, or at least not in this life. It seemed a lot of the drug dealers and heroin addicts had survived. The addicts were an asset: they worked harder than anyone else when it came to the cash-for-clearing-sewage-from-the-canal initiative. It seems they needed cash more than anyone else.
I took Nandikka to buy a sewing machine. I wasn’t sure that she was in any state to work, but she came to life in front of a big heavy foot-treadle Singer, the like of which has not been available new in England for a long time. I watched her wringing hands turn to nimble skill. She chose materials, scissors and thread and I commissioned her to make some dolls to go in the doll’s houses which a carpenter was constructing for local schools.
Shortly before I left Sri Lanka I went to Nandikka’s house to buy a sarong, and she showed me her son’s schoolbag and photograph. I was pleased. Her attitude seemed more positive. It seemed that her focus had shifted from her own guilt to remembering the child that her son was. As I was leaving, she told me that she had decided to try for another child.
(Article written to raise funds for Cork Aid to Sri Lanka, an Irish charity started by two other aid workers I met in Sri Lanka).
He is proud of the callouses on his hands. They are not the same shape as a carpenter’s but he can always tell a carpenter by the callouses on their hands. If his hands start to soften he does some practical work until they are tough again. We shook hands. They were, indeed, tough. I took his photo and web address: elikemdrums.com. I shall have a peek at it and imagine the smell of the leathery skins and the feel of his leathery skin working with them.
