Adele Barker

Engineering
Senior Project Manager Education
Flowing Wells Schools
Maestrp de Espanol Trades/Construction
Pioneer Landscaping
Yard Person/Loader Operator Production and Manufacturing
Pioneer Landscaping
Crushing Crew Education
Flowing Wells Schools
Spanish Teacher/High School Finance and Accounting
SENIOR CONTROLLER General
Grocery/Market Mgr-Cafe/Restaurant Mgr

Kandy, Sri Lanka — In October, I returned to Sri Lanka after an almost three-year absence. I had come back to finish a book. Part of that book would be about the toll the tsunami had taken on Sri Lankan society.

And so in November I set off on a three-week journey along the coast to see for myself how the reconstruction was coming. My trip took me as much around the perimeter of the island as I could safely travel. Twenty years of civil war have made it virtually impossible to follow the coastline around the island.

Parts of the island are under government control; other parts under LTTE, or Tamil Tiger, control. This seemingly minor point becomes extremely important when local and international relief organizations are trying to deliver aid to tsunami-stricken victims.

One can talk endlessly over here about what has and hasn't been done, but at the end, it is the images that stand out most starkly: women whose gold marriage chains and bangles were the only items remaining on them as they crawled from the water to safety, their saris floating out to sea; hastily constructed graves with crosses or stone slabs, sometimes with names attached, more often with no names; the black pools of stagnant water not far from the ocean's edge, the dead trunks of palm trees, standing tall like telephone polls.

I spent three weeks in more than 30 refugee camps up and down the coast. I learned not to ask who was related to whom. These were new collations of families once unrelated, now joined at the hip by loss. In one camp everyone had lost at least four members of their family. In some cases new families are formed from those who remained.

There were also the stories of rape, alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide. The incidence of suicide peaked in the camps about three months after the tsunami and has fallen off in the past few months. It has not, however, disappeared.

As I went from camp to camp, I found myself asking the same questions over and over again. Why hasn't more permanent housing been completed? I looked for some overarching explanation for this, but I found that the reasons for the delay varied enormously, often depending on local conditions.

In many camps, there were complaints about the government dragging its feet. Some of the complaints center around the government's insistence that any new construction be at least 650 feet back from the sea, a law not uniformly adhered to along all parts of the coast and relaxed considerably by former President Chandrika Kumaratunga's government before last month's election.

There is clearly selective enforcement privileging those who serve the tourist industry while others, predominantly in the north and east, are being held to the 650-foot limit. The fishermen are in no hurry to move into permanent housing that places them too far away from the sea's edge, from their nets and their boats.

Up north on the Jaffna Peninsula, the story is different altogether. Here one encounters camps of people displaced not only by the tsunami but by a 20-year civil war.

Shells of houses, bombed out churches, blackened palm and palmyra trees are as easily a function of the war as of the tsunami. Here the building proceeds slowly. Little aid reached this region because of the ongoing political crisis. What saved this situation from becoming a complete debacle was the presence of certain international aid organizations — Germany's GDZ, the Swiss Development Corp., UNICEF and Save the Children to name but a few — that were already on the ground dealing with refugees from the civil war.

But something else stalls the progress. It is hard to rebuild when there is little hope that the same thing isn't going to happen all over again. A fisherman told me his house had been destroyed three times in the 20-year-old civil war. After that, it was destroyed again by the tsunami. Now the threat of civil war looms again with the threat of more displacement. "Why should I rebuild?" he asked me. I didn't have an answer.

The generosity of the world community in the wake of the tsunami was overwhelming. The problems began in Sri Lanka, indeed as elsewhere, with on-the-ground organization and dissemination. As a result, some towns now have more boats than there are fishermen while people in the same village still eke out a daily existence in the shells of the structures they once inhabited. Aid organizations were essentially in competition with one another. One aid worker aptly called it "compassionate competition."

The complexities in this recovery twine around each other like the vines of the trees here. One cannot separate the recovery from this tragedy from the threat of civil war that hovers over this country.

I met a young woman holding a 5-month-old baby in a refugee camp north of Batticaloa on the east coast. She told me that she and her husband survived the tsunami, but that three months later he was killed by Tiger sniper fire. I suppose that says it all.