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24th
January, 2005
PHOTO
ESSAY: WORLD VISION'S RELIEF EFFORTS IN SRI LANKA AND
INDIA
Above
& below: Porselvi, 20, who was left widowed with
two young children when the tsunami hit, is one of the
thousands of people receiving aid from funds donated
to World Vision. Her husband was in their seashore mud
house on the southern coastof India when the waves hit.
Porselvi was out fetching water and her children were
playing in the village temple. She survived by holding
on to a concrete house and clinging to surrounding coconut
trees. The 20-year-old who has sought shelter in a relief
camp in Kallar has been given an aid package from World
Vision including a mat, bed sheets, sari and water.
She is trying to come to terms with her grief while
still supporting her children, Nishan, five, and Niveda,
three.
Above:
Relief being provided in the Ampara district of Sri
Lanka.
Above:
Aid arriving in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Above:
Gauri Sanar, who is receiving emergency aid
package from World Vision's relief distribution at Don
Bosco church and technical school north of Colombo in
Sri Lanka. She is one of three sisters (Sumehdi, four,
and Suuniy, eight). With her mother and father they
went to live in the church with 350 others after their
entire fishing village was destroyed by the tsunami. |
ALL
IMAGES: Courtesy of World Vision Australia
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CHRIS
PIPER
The scale of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami
is hard to fathom. An earthquake on the Richter scale of nine
generates approximately 100 times as much shaking (wave amplitude
as measured by a seismometer) and 1,000 times as much energy
as one of magnitude seven. The devastation, particularly in
coastal areas of Aceh, is of a scale that most experienced
relief practitioners will not have been exposed to before.
The scale of the disaster in Aceh, combined with difficult
access and earlier political and security constraints, have
meant that the response stage here currently lags behind that
of Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and other affected countries.
There are huge sums of money which have been allocated to
agencies seeking to assist survivors of the tsunami. The challenge
will be to allocate these in ways which encourage sustainability
rather than dependence; support those which are also affected
in less direct ways; and which do not lead to financial management,
nepotism and corruption.
The challenge of financial transparency, management and accountability
will be of paramount importance in order to maintain the goodwill
generated by the public globally. Finance has been raised
from a variety of sources, including national trust funds
and contributions to non-government organisations (NGOs) and
bilateral/multilateral donors. The task of first tracking
actual donations against pledges and then reconciling donations
against expenditure will prove testing.
The challenge of effective co-ordination at different levels
(from central government down to local levels) will be intense
at both the disaster and post-disaster stages. Ideally, the
key parties should be the affected communities themselves
working in close collaboration with government departments.
A plethora of other stake-holders also need to be involved
however - these including civil society organisations; faith-based
institutions; NGOs, both local and international; commercial
companies; the armed forces (again both national and international);
and donors, both bilateral and multilateral.
Huge numbers of people will have suffered varying degrees
of psycho-social trauma as a result of the tsunami. Ideally
appropriate support is best offered by national care-givers,
with international donors being in an ideal position to appropriately
complement and strengthen these services.
There is the challenge of where and when people will return
to build their houses and establish homes. Some communities
will be so traumatised by the event that there will be a reluctance
to return to close proximity to the ocean. Alternative locations
and livelihoods will pose great challenges for these communities
and their respective government departments.
Wherever people choose to eventually live, there will be a
requirement to repair the infrastructure (such as bridges
and roads); provide logistical access and basic services (such
as power and water); and re-establish government services
such as functioning bureaucracies, schools and health service.
The tsunami will in some places have polluted and/or salinated
both water supplies and agricultural land. There will be the
need to return all of these elements back to situations whereby
people can draw their livelihoods from.
People will want to return to their livelihoods as soon as
possible. In many coastal areas people have been dependent
on a variety of agricultural, fishing, trading activities,
with more specialist sectors such as tourism in some locations.
Care and skill will be needed to provide the most appropriate
levels of support, these including the provision of grants,
loans and other material and human resource support. Care
will be needed to show some degree of equity to others indirectly
affected by the disaster (such as trucking companies whose
businesses have collapsed to the demise of fishing communities).
The international media attention on the tsunami is now receding,
although a ‘honeymoon’ period still exists where
there is generally a good degree of co-operation and goodwill
between key stake-holders. Over time this ‘honeymoon’
period will disappear, and tensions between different groups
will arise.
The situations in both Sri Lanka and Aceh have been complicated
by the fact that both places were host to a situation of insurgency,
with rebel forces in conflict with government troops. Whilst
some initial goodwill and co-operation between protagonists
developed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster (particularly
in Sri Lanka), it does not appear that substantial positive
political breakthroughs have occurred in either place.
In any area of conflict, particularly in the post 9/11 world
we live in, there will be increasing security concerns for
certain foreign parties. This particularly applies in Aceh
where over time there is likely to be some feelings of antipathy
towards both western military forces (particularly US and
Australian), and some NGOs, particularly Christian ones. It
is therefore incumbent that these potentially targeted groups
where possible adopt a ‘Do No Harm’ approach,
and abide by international standards and guidelines, such
as adherence to International Humanitarian Law (in the case
of the military), or the Red Cross/Crescent and NGO Code of
Conduct (for NGOs).
Finally many communities which have been worse affected will
consist of people who were vulnerable (in either their livelihoods
or the location of their homes) due to their poverty. While
it is important that post-disaster activities include a range
of risk reduction initiatives, substantial long-term progress
will only be effectively achieved in many cases when attention
is focused on addressing the roots causes of this poverty.
Chris Piper
is the chief executive of Australian-based overseas aid consultancy
TorqAid.
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