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Hillcrest Road
Jeff and I arrived in Sri Lanka on Feb 7. My mission is to develop a plan with Sarvodaya, the Sri Lankan NGO that is hosting us, to offer specialized training in grief and trauma therapy to non-therapists so as to reach the largest numbers of people affected by the tsunami as possible. The planning for this work is proceeding well and I expect to see the project come to fruition despite its many complexities. I wanted to share some of our experiences here as we have been attempting to understand the situation and how to tackle the problem. On Friday, 2/11/05, we traveled from Moratuwa to Hanboteta along the southern coast by van with a large contingent of Sarvodaya staff who were going to a meeting to organize their legal services work in the field. Savodaya Legal Services has launched a joint project with the government to reconstruct legal documents for people who lost everything in the flood. They will help them get birth certificates and property documents reconstructed so that they can get identity papers and can provide proof of property ownership. This will entitle them to certain government support programs. The extent of the devastation along the southern coast was heartbreaking. The worst we saw was just west of Galle where 4500 people died and many are still missing. There were stretches of rubble with suddenly a house left standing. Everywhere people were working to clean-up and rebuild. There were many international NGOs in evidence. We passed many tents in camps with international insignias, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Italy, UN, Netherlands. We also met people from Japan, Malta, Canada and the US involved in helping. The amount to do was overwhelming, but it was encouraging to see the world at work. There were many people who had put up a tent on their old home site. As they worked to clear the rubble, they also cleaned up their old bricks for reuse and stacked them neatly. These were not shanties that had been destroyed, but mostly brick homes. It may have been homes of cement block that we saw that were left standing. I was told that one of the unresolved problems is that there isn’t enough building material available on hand to rebuild the quantity of homes required. They must be rebuilt out of cement blocks, not bricks. They need cement blocks and they don’t have sufficient facilities or supplies to build the necessary quantity. Meanwhile the people who can are chipping away the cement from the old bricks and reusing them. From a psychological standpoint at least, this is good healthy work to do. It belies the terrible feelings of helplessness and despair. Driving slowly though the devastation in the van, we could see the faces of the survivors. They looked drawn and grim. I thought it was good they had physical work to do, but watching from the van, it left us silent and sad. I put my hands in gassho and began to chant silently to myself, “Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Swaha (Gone, gone, completely gone. Gone to the other side.) Wasanthi, sitting next to me asked me to chant aloud so they could all participate. Tears arose as I chanted. I was glad I had this project to do so that I could be of some help. On Saturday, 2/12/05, we started at the Legal Clinic in Hanboteta which had been organized by the government for the people in the area to get their legal documents again so they could apply for the necessary aid. The Sarvodaya Legal Services Movement was a large part of the team working on this project and they had all of their legal services staff working at different clinics in the area. The clinic had been advertised by posting notices everywhere in the towns and in the camps. I took pictures of the busy scene. I saw two Muslim women dressed in black and motioned asking permission to take their picture. They nodded their assent and smiled so I snapped the shot. Shortly after, they approached me and asked in English if they could give me their address and would I send them a copy of the picture. I said of course, and gave them my pad to write their address. They were sisters. The one who spoke very good English said she and her sister had each lost two children. She said it quite calmly, but I was taken aback. “You each lost two children?” “Yes,” she said, “We lost seven children in our family.” Another sister lost a daughter and her brother lost two children. They were four families living very close to the sea. I teared up at the unbelievable loss they had undergone. They were living in a camp nearby and invited me to come visit them in their camp home. Since my schedule was being managed by Yamuna, my guide from Sarvodaya, I introduced them to her and explained the situation. They had a short dialogue in Sinhala and Yamuna said that she had told them we would try to visit later in the day. I felt such a sadness thinking of the magnitude of their loss. I guessed that approaching me in the square, a complete stranger, foreign, dressed in a strange Zen uniform, must have been a signal of their desperation. We left the clinic and went to a camp jointly managed by Sarvodaya and the JVP, an opposition political party. Here were long wooden row houses with tin roofs. This camp, called Beat The Sea in Sinhala, housed 51 families with 56 school children and 10 pre-school children, a total of 212 people. They were mostly families of farmers and laborers and most of the men were working. The families here had lost only two children. They were from two villages which had lost 168 people in all. The villagers were in several camps, not all in this one. Sarvodaya counselors were coming twice a week to meet with the children and the parents. There was a children’s activity being led by some volunteer school teachers, who were coming on Saturday to plan an activity for Saturday with the children. There were about 30 children ranging in ages from 3 to 10 in a small room very intently following the teacher in making folded paper. We joined them to much excitement on their part. The children all seemed to know and love Kusum, one of the counselors from Sarvodaya. Kusum said she began working in this camp about three weeks after the tsunami and at that time the children were very silent or unable to stop crying. Now, although they were far from being finished with the grief, they were very lively and responsive. I asked the children what they needed. The boys all yelled out they needed bicycles. They had bicycles before the flood, but now they had none and they had to walk to school. The girls wanted storybooks and dolls. They also wanted volleyball sets, hats, umbrellas, soccer balls and musical instruments. This was a very enlivening exchange. On leaving Beat the Sea, we set out to find the camp the Muslim women had come from. Although it wasn’t easy since there were many camps in the area, we did eventually find it. The women were very glad to see us again. They invited us into their home which like the previous camp was a row house. Their one room, which was maybe 20’x20’, was divided into four rooms with curtains. It housed a family of six. We met with the two women and their mother. Then one of the husbands joined by sitting on the other side of the curtain, but visible and within hearing. I would guess the parents were in their thirties or early forties. The younger sister, Mrs. B, who had lost two children, a boy and a girl, 5 and 3 years old, had no other children, but was 8 months pregnant. Kusum invited her outside to talk in private as she seemed very distraught. The older sister, Mrs. S, had lost an 11 year old girl and a 4 year old girl and had three other children who survived. Mrs. S. had only one photo of the older daughter, and none of her youngest. The photos were gone too. She asked us to take her photo of her 11 year old daughter to see if we could locate her in one of the other camps. She was still hoping that this daughter might be a survivor because she had gone to the fair with her older cousin that day and maybe she was in another camp. We had seen the fairgrounds that morning as they were near our hotel and they were wiped clean. They were near the sea on a flat surface with no trees (trees had saved many lives) and several thousand people had been washed out in the first wave. She said she couldn’t stop hoping even though she knew it was hopeless. Yamuna took the photo to see what she could do about posting it and promised to return it. We asked her how she had lost her youngest, the four year old. She looked down, held out her hand and said she was holding her hand and then she was gone. She couldn’t hold her tightly enough. We asked if they were receiving counseling from anyone, and were surprised to find that no counselor from any NGO or the government was yet visiting the camp. The Sarvodaya counsellors said they did not know the camp was there. The father asked if we could arrange some counseling for the children. They needed some kind of program. Sarvodaya said they would come and start one. We asked about the losses in the rest of the camp. Mrs. Safeena said that only five families in the camp had lost family members. The others had lost homes or their homes had been damaged. She made this comment several times conveying to us how much greater their loss was. Their family constituted four of the five families with lost family members. This family needs so much psycho-spiritual help. We wondered how many other camps were not yet receiving any of this kind of help yet. With Metta, P.S. Please use my letter in any way it may benefit Sarvodaya. Also, if people wish to contribute funds to this project and are sending money to Sarvodaya USA, it's important they specify this project, SLSM Psycho-Spiritual Healing Project, otherwise the funds go into a general account and are allocated according to their own rules.
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