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December 2004/January 2005
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Letter of Appeal for Assistance to Sri Lanka Disaster Victims contd. from home page

Images from our visit to Trincomalee

We are now considering responding to a call from two schools in the Southern coastal town of Matara, one a Catholic convent girls school and the other a Buddhist girls school. We want to supply library books to replace the books that were destroyed by the floods.

We are exploring the possibilities for long-term assistance. It is likely that we would adopt a village or two in Trincomalee for rehabilitation that would include housing and construction of common amenities such as schools and a hospital. Any contribution that you are able to make will be most appreciated. You may send a cheque drawn either in favour of any of the following three organizations: The Kandy News Telephone 94-81-222-9991), International Centre for Ethnic Studies or the Lions Club of Senkadagala. Please mail your cheques to the following address: c/o ICES 554/6A Peradeniya Road, Kandy, Sri Lanka. (Telephone 94-81-223-4892). The ICES will direct the cheque acts as the overall accounting authority for this Fund and will direct the cheque to the appropriate organization encashment.

We are especially mindful of accountability and transparency in this endeavor. We want to stress that every dollar that you give will be used only for purchase of supplies to asst the victims or for rehabilitation work. There will be absolutely no charge for overheads. The Kandy News/Lions Club/ICES will send you an official receipt to your personal address as printed on the cheque. We will publish an account of the distribution of relief supplies in The Kandy News. We will also e-mail to you a full set of accounts. We will also post updates on this website.

If you are sending a contribution please send an e-mail to k_news@sltnet.lk ASAP indicating the amount so that we can budget in advance for purchase of relief supplies and other assistance.

Thank you in advance for your help.

With warm regards

Shirley Jayawardena
Managing Director
The Kandy News

Update 2

More images from our visit to Trincomalee

From: Sam Samarasinghe

International Centre for Ethnic Studies, The Kandy News, Senkadagala Lions Club Sri Lanka Disaster Relief

Mailing address in Sri Lanka: ICES, 554/6A, Peradeniya Road, Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Tel/Fax: 011-94-81-223-4892; 011-94-77-30-50-111

Date: January 10, 2005

Dear Friends:
I am very happy to send you this second update on the relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction work that we have launched with the generous contributions that you have made to help the tsunami victims in Sri Lanka.

Fund Raising
To date we have collected about $14,000. This is an increase of $5,000 over the $9,000 that we had when I wrote my first update exactly one week ago on January 03rd. Several people made a second contribution last week to augment the Fund. If you know of any people who wish to make a donation please forward this update to show what we are doing and to consider us for assistance. (Cheques payable to either of the following organizations: International Centre for Ethnic Studies (Kandy, Sri Lanka) OR The Lions Club of Senkadagala (Kandy, Sri Lanka) Mailing address for cheques: You may mail it to the ICES address shown above. However, the safest and most convenient method is to mail the cheque to my home address in the US (10114 Kensington Parkway, Kensington, MD 20895). My wife Vidya collects them and couriers to ICES. If you have any questions you may please contact her at 301-962-7611.

Relief Supplies
On Saturday January 8th we took about $11,400 worth of relief supplies. This is considerably more than the sum that I indicated to you in a brief note that I sent to you late last week. We spent only about $5000 from the funds that we have collected. We managed to leverage about $6400 from other local donors to more than double the amount available for supplies. The following items were taken from Kandy to Trincomalee

The overheads worth about $ 600 such as rental for two trucks that transported the supplies, and bus and food for 30 people from the three organizing institutions who went from Kandy to Trincomalee were covered by ICES, Sri Lanka Telecom and personal contributions from those who participated. No funds that have been donated to ICES and the Lions Club were used for this purpose.

We originally planned to take a supply of medicines. But health officials in Trincomalee advised us that they had sufficient supplies and that there is no immediate need for additional supplies. Thus what we took were items that people genuinely needed.

Distribution
We left Kandy at 4.30 a.m. on Saturday 8th January and returned around 2.30 a.m. on Sunday. The journey to Trincomalee each way takes about four to five hours excluding stops.

We targeted the following camps for assistance:
Trincomalee Town Camp at the Buddhist Temple “Jayasumanaramaya”
This has a predominantly Sinhalese population of about 1350 consisting of 340 families.

Alankerni Vinayagar School in Nilavelli village. This is a Tamil village with a small minority Muslim population. The grade 1-5 child population was about 120. (Note to Tulane Students who visited Trincomalee: This is the village where Hotel Club Oceanic where we stayed in the summer is located)

Kinniya High School and Kinniya Community Centre. Kinniya is a predominantly Muslim/Malay village with a small Tamil population. The village has a total IDP population of about 2000 consisting of about 500 families. (Kinniya High School is one of the two places affected by the disaster in Sri Lanka that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan visited on his tour last Sunday. We reached Kinniya just after he left. Kinniya is the village that hosted the Tulane group in summer 2004)

Members from the Trincomalee Lions Club who are our local partners and employees from Sri Lanka Telecom joined us in the distribution of supplies. In the Trincomalee Town camp the Sri Lanka military was in charge of administration. However, they readily permitted us to distribute the supplies as we saw fit and we gave what we had directly to the beneficiaries.

The Nilavelli school is also a camp for some families that have lost their houses. It also provides sleeping accommodation in the night for families who are trying to repair their damaged houses that are not yet habitable. The school principal and staff organized the distribution. The commander of the Naval Camp that is about 1 mile away from the school also came to the school to welcome us. He is technically in charge of all IDP camps in the area.

In Kinniya we managed to distribute only a part of the supplies that were earmarked for the village. We ran out of time and our local partners Lions Cub of Trincomalee will distribute the balance supplies on Wednesday 12th through the school that is scheduled to start today.

Lessons Learned
This second visit reinforced some of the impressions we got in our needs assessment trip on Sunday January 02nd and made us also revise some of the notions we have had about the situation in Trincomalee. I give below a few bullet points that may interest you, especially those who have a scholarly/professional interest in Disaster Assistance.

· Even in the same neighborhood the degree to which people have suffered varies a great deal. This is mainly due to either the nature of the house they have had or the micro variation of the force with which the tsunami struck. This means long term reconstruction has to be highly targeted at the local level to make it effective and equitable.

· All of us who went from Kandy were unanimous that the best thing we did was to give the children school supplies (and toys). The smile that the little gift brought to their faces said it all.

· As one would expect, especially in the context of the conflict and the sensitivity of Trincomalee that is multi-ethnic and has a strong presence of both the LTTE and the military, the politics of relief is an important factor. We were told that LTTE was not happy about a role for the military that the government has created in the camps. Obviously to the extent that this is a factor it mostly affects the Tamil IDPs. What we noticed was that while general directives are issued from Colombo the implementation of such directives varied a lot from place to place. Often the local officials appeared to be doing what was feasible. For example, in the Trincomalee town camp the military was in charge and the predominantly Sinhala population appeared to accept the situation. In the Nilavelli School the Tamil principal and staff appeared to be in charge with the navy keeping a very low profile. In Kinniya which is largely Muslim, there was a large presence of security personnel on account of Annan’s visit. But the moment he left the area almost every one of them took the ferry and left. The village leaders with whom we worked told us that the IDP camp has no security personnel even when they are needed!

· The need for additional emergency relief supplies must be met only on a very selective basis guided by reliable information from those who administer IDP camps and are thoroughly familiar with the communities.

· Now that fifteen days have elapsed since the tsunami struck Sri Lanka it is best to move on as quickly as possible to rehabilitation and reconstruction, especially creating conditions to help people regain their livelihoods. We saw an excellent example of this at Hotel Cub Oceanic in Nilavelli where we had lunch. The Hotel that was quite badly damaged by the tsunami was up and running with 40 guests housed in the upper floor rooms that were not affected by the flood waters. One of Sri Lanka’s largest companies owns the hotel. Thus they have had the capital and other resources to reopen the hotel very quickly. Small businesses and the self-employed do not have such resources and face other constraints. For example, farms that were flooded with sea water won’t be suitable for cultivation for two years or more.

Next Steps for Our Project
We have had requests for help from Southern Sri Lanka also. While we would continue to have Trincomalee as our focus it would only be fair to provide some assistance to disaster victims in the South. This is also a politically sensitive issue in the country with the South being predominantly Sinhalese and the East being predominantly Tamil/Muslim. We have tentatively identified two schools in the town of Matara in the south for assistance. One is St Mary’s Convent, a Catholic school, that was severely damaged. The other is a Buddhist school, Mahamaya Girls’ School, that sat next to the Convent. Mahamaya has been completely washed away and is likely to be relocated inland away from the shore. St. Mary’s has requested for some books for the school library that had been totally destroyed. We have not yet had a discussion with the Mahamaya School authorities as to what help we could offer them. We want to earmark about $1000 for each of the two schools.

In Trincomalee we hope to do the following in the coming weeks and months:
· ICES in collaboration with USAID and the University of Peradeniya and with the assistance of Payson Center of Tulane University will develop a data base for the affected areas of Trincomalee. The main client is the District Task Force for Relief, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction. A recent Payson graduate Jason Smith has arrived in Sri Lanka to work as a volunteer in this project.

· Based on the data that we gather and other information from our Trincomalee partners and official sources, we hope to select one or more villages for long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction. The resources required for such a project would far exceed the $7000 that we have as of today (after spending about $2000 on the two southern schools) in the ICES Relief Fund. We are hoping that more donations would be made in the coming weeks to augment this amount. But we also hope to collaborate with others – Lions District 306C, USAID and other donors – to leverage funds for this project.

I hope that this update has given you some idea of not only what we doing with the contribution that you have made to our Fund but also the broader situation with respect to the disaster. I will write again when I have something useful to say.

Thank you very much for your help and support.

Sam Samarasinghe
Director, ICES

From: Sam Samarasinghe

ICES, The Kandy News, Senkadagala Lions Club Sri Lanka Disaster Relief

Date: January 03, 2005

Dear Friends:
First I want to thank you once gain for your generous donation to provide relief and rehabilitation assistance to the victims of Sri Lanka’s Tsunami disaster. With your help we have collected over the last four days over $9,000. With a little luck we should reach or exceed the $10,000 mark. This is about Sri Lanka Rupees 1.0 million at the current official exchange rate. In Sri Lanka a dollar buys about four times what it would in the US. In effect we have so far collected over $36,000 in US purchasing power terms.

Yesterday, Sunday, about ten of us from the three institutions that are involved in this effort visited Trincomalee in North-East Sri Lanka to make a needs assessment. The Lions Club of Trincomalee and the USAID district office in Trincomalee hosted us and took us to Kinniya and Uppuweli villages north of Trincomalee town that are among the worst affected. We saw the destruction that the Tsunami has caused to land and property and listened to harrowing tales of woe of residents many of whom have lost their loved ones.

Based on our observations and following a discussion with our hosts we decided on the following program of action in Kinniya and Uppuweli to utilize the funds that you so generously donated.

Relief – Visit Trincomalee on Saturday 8th January with Supplies

· Provide school supplies to children from grades 1 to 3 in four schools. One school is Sinhalese, one Muslim, and two Tamil.

· Provide toys and material for drawing to the above children and to their younger siblings. (Sri Lanka has no resources for trauma counseling. We observed that the children in the areas that we visited did not behave “normally.” The usual smile that children have on their faces was gone. They looked traumatized and almost certainly are. Psychologists have advised us that toys and drawing material may help these children to come to terms with the situation)

· Provide underwear for women in three camps –one Sinhalese, one Tamil and one Muslim - that house displaced persons (In Sri Lankan culture this is a taboo topic for public discussion. We have been told that while other items of clothing are reaching the victims, female underwear is in short supply.)

· If funds are available we will also purchase rubber slippers for the people in the three camps.

· Supply medicine on request from the doctors who are working in the area (As per request from doctors that we contacted we took a small supply of essential medicine on Sunday)

Long-term Rehabilitation & Reconstruction

Only about $3000 will remain with ICES et al after relief supplies are purchased this week. The funds that we have won’t be sufficient for any substantial work on our own. Thus we intend to use our resources to leverage funds from donors for a project. The three institutions from Kandy will join with the Lions Club of Trincomalee to adopt one village for rehabilitation and reconstruction. The village will be selected after further investigation. The goal is to build a model community. Any donations that we receive after next Saturday will be used for this long term project.

GIS Data Base and Livelihood Assessment

As you probably know ICES which is one the leading think tanks in the country has very considerable research capability. We readily agreed to a request from a donor agency to quickly build a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data base for Trincomalee and also do an assessment of livelihood needs of those that were affected by the disaster. This will be the “academic” contribution of ICES to the rehabilitation and reconstruction effort. We hope to develop the data base over the next few weeks at an accelerated pace and provide fortnightly reports to the district decision makers on the progress made in the rehabilitation and reconstruction spheres. Funding for this work will be provided by a donor agency.

Note to Tulane Students
I will have the summer study abroad program this year as planned from June 28 to July 15. However, this year the course will have a special component on the disaster and post-disaster rehabilitation and reconstruction that I know is of interest to many of you. This will be all the more interesting because the disaster has implications for the regular themes of the Sri Lanka course, viz. ethnic conflict, the ceasefire that is in force, and peace negotiations.

Sam Samarasinghe
Director, ICES