10th January, 2006

JAN BUTLER

Brad Hopkins stands amid the ruins of brick house in one of Colombo’s worst slums. At his feet a gaunt mongrel snaps at fat flies and yards away, hungry black crows peck at the huge mounds of rotting rubbish. His smart shoes are spattered with mud and his shirt damp with sweat, but Hopkins is looking upwards. And is grinning.

“That’s one of our new roofs,” he says pointing. “Any painted red, or green. Those are ours. We’re also putting running water into the houses here and repairing the toilets that were damaged in the tsunami. In this area, there are currently only seven or eight toilets - people don’t have their own toilets, they have communal ones. I’m not sure how many people live here, but we’ve repaired about 70 houses.”

RECONSTRUCTION WORK: Brad Hopkins points to one of the new roofs World Vision have built in Colombo, Sri Lanka, following the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami. “At first it was chaotic. There was little infrastructure to support such a massive aid effort,” Brad Hopkins says of the days immediately following the tsunami.

At just 26, Hopkins is the deputy operations manager in Sri Lanka for one of the country’s biggest aid agencies: World Vision.

Before 26th December, 2004, he was working in Australia earning a living in corporate finance. By the end of January, he was on the South East Asian island nation as part of the organized chaos that was the post-tsunami aid response.

“I’d resigned from Macquarie Bank and was planning to go to work for AusAID in Samoa,” he explains.

“Then the tsunami happened, and I contacted World Vision and offered to volunteer. I thought I’d be put in a call centre in Melbourne. Instead they asked if I would be interested in coming here, to Sri Lanka. It was because of my experience in tendering processes, infrastructure and law.

“I left Australia within a week of that offer.”

He started at the Colombo-based offices of World Vision Lanka only a month after the tidal waves had devastated three-quarters of the island’s coastline and killed more than 30,000 people. The job of getting aid to hundreds of thousands of survivors in need was immense. Hopkins started by helping to set up operational systems in the early days, as well as helping with legal issues. But before long he had become involved with co-ordinating shelter and infrastructure.

“At first it was chaotic. There was little infrastructure to support such a massive aid effort,” he says. Roads were damaged, hospitals and clinics destroyed - all in a country that had only two years before coming out of a 20-year civil war.

“Life was extremely busy. I worked 10 to 12 hour days almost every day until May or June. That was fine until I got dengue fever. That hurt a lot. But I worked through it because there was no one else to take over and there was so much to be done. There were so many people in tents and half-finished shelters that needed to be completed on the east and south coasts.”

Hopkins did finally get two weeks back in Australia to recover from the tropical disease and World Vision has built close to 2,300 temporary shelters for more than 10,000 people right across the island - something that was recognized by the President of Sri Lanka who presented the charity with a gold achievement award.

In May, as aid agencies turned their focus to providing permanent housing, Brad started working closely with local charity Samata Sarana (Hope for All). Started in 1988 by Sister Bernie Silva, a Catholic nun with a big heart and firm belief in hard work and prayer, the charity initially came to World Vision to ask for food to feed tsunami victims in the north of Colombo. The partnership between the two NGOs grew until Sister Silva asked World Vision to help her rebuild damaged houses in the slum area where her charity is working.

“They [Samata Sarana] have been working in this community for a long, long time,” explains Hopkins. “Doing reconstruction and repair here is a really difficult project to carry out. You’d have to go house to house identifying who was affected by the tsunami and who wasn’t. Technical experts have to go to see each house to decide what needs to be repaired. That’s a lot of community work and only a charity like this one that the community respects can easily do it.

“World Vision is funding the charity to do the repairs and it is a big project,” he says, “it costs around US$1.3m.”

It’s clear, just walking through the town of Bokawatte how much work needs to be done here. Many buildings are nothing but rubble, roads are thick with mud after the heavy rains. But climb up onto the top of an undamaged building and you look down on a crowded community with a growing number of red and green roofs.

“The people here are extremely poor and have been forgotten or ignored in the past. This is a slum area and so it’s good to have a project to help these people because this sort of poverty can fall through the gaps. We’re providing the first steps to people getting at least adequate housing.

“I think this is one of the best projects we do. We use local labour, we are partnering with a local NGO, we are working effectively with the local government and the local community are working to repair their own houses. I’ve even seen women and children carrying bricks! They’re that eager to rebuild. In other areas, lots of people are being relocated away from their original homes, which is very sad because they lose that sense of community. What we have done here is taken a community that was struggling and run down and strengthened it and that’s great.”

Despite his evident pleasure at what he sees as a job well done, he’s fully aware of those who criticized the tsunami-recovery work in Sri Lanka - both here and abroad.

“There’s a bit of mismatch between the opinions of those who work in the field, and the media and government. Aid agencies couldn’t have done what they’ve done more efficiently, mainly because we have to be very careful with how we spend the money. If you consider the sheer volume of work to be done, there was always a risk of spending it in an undisciplined way. If we had given in to the calls to work faster, this might have happened.

“Also, don’t forget that Sri Lanka used to build around 7,000 houses a year before the tsunami, then it was faced with building 200,000 temporary shelters and tens of thousands of permanent shelters. That’s not including the schools, hospitals and shops that need rebuilding. Such a workload slows things down for NGOs.

“No one guessed how long it would take to rebuild Sri Lanka after the tsunami. I think that governments and beneficiaries are coming to terms with the fact that it’s going to take a lot longer than they first thought. You can build a house in a month, but it takes much more time to rebuild a community.”

Hopkins shakes hands with his friends from Samata Sarana and turns to leave. As he makes his way back to his van, the banker-turned-aid worker looks around him at the workmen fixing roofs and doorways filled with smiling people.

Perhaps he is a little wistful, for in the new year, he’s traveling to London where he’s going back to work in the private sector.

“I’ll be more useful in aid work after I’ve had a couple more years in the corporate sector and improved my skills,” he explains. “There are also many ways to contribute to the aid sector and I think the best way for me right now is by telling people in the business world how their money really does make a difference to a project like this. I can communicate to people from first-hand experience what goes into a response like this so more people will support it.”

But Hopkins has absolutely no regrets about his time in post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

“Eight months on, you see an enormous positive shift,” he says. “Disease and hunger that were real risks after the disaster were averted. We are seeing people getting back to living their lives and I’m very pleased I was a part of that.

“I think that I made a small, but positive contribution.”

Jan Butler works for World Vision in Sri Lanka.

- www.worldvision.com.au