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http://www.indiadisasters.org/tsunami/
A one stop humanitarian website that
pools together tsunami response efforts in India
Read the Chennai Declaration
Now
Available:
"Goodwill
is not enough: A reflection on Post-tsunami disaster response, a
discussion video based on the two day
workshop, strategies" is now available. For more
information about the video please contact the PHM Secretariat
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Goodwill is Not Enough, say Tsunami aid workers
Humanitarian workers, those who go from one disaster to another, know that
it is not enough to blithely set out to help people. And if the disaster
is spread over nations divided by wide seas, old wars, steady prejudice
and privilege then there is very little space for Pollyannas. Around 150
days after the tsunami, humanitarian aid workers are pausing to review and
regroup. In a meeting organized by the People’s Health Movement on 8 and 9
April 2005 over 60 non-governmental organizations and funding agencies
from around the world came together in Chennai to share experiences, chart
the road ahead and debate the role of aid workers. The aid workers were
primarily representatives from India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, three of the
nations most affected by the tsunami. Also present were aid workers from
dozens of countries like Nicaragua and Bangladesh who have learnt about
disasters from painful encounters. A document that records some of these
discussions and decisions is about to be released by the People’s Health
Movement under the name of the Chennai Declaration.
The tsunami is over a hundred days
old and unfortunately no longer a saleable commodity in mainstream media.
The stories are still fresh on the lips of relief workers though. This is
not the chest-thumping stuff of my-disaster-is-bigger-than-yours.” “It
hurts that my mother is gone,” says a young girl simply in one of Satya
Sivaraman’s short films. Many stories are that of pain and grief, things
that hurt, things that are simple. But many other stories aid workers
shared at the consultation were like puzzles set by mysterious creatures
to test the heroes of legends. In helping communities rebuild should NGO’s
perpetuate the same inequalities or use these opportunities to change
exploitative situations? Where does intervention end and where does
intrusion begin? When should aid end?
It may have been alright for Alexander to take his sword and cut through
the Gordian knot but machismo is really not an option for aid workers. And
diplomacy is sorely tested as aid workers try to rebuild in areas where
the communities are at war with each other or the state is at war is with
its own people.
Walls that tsunamis cannot break
Since December 2004 stories of great generosity, courage and love have
warmed a world chilled from the apocalyptic wave. Aid workers from every
nation affirmed that local communities, families and friends have often
played a sterling role in rescue and relief work. Ethnic and religious
lines were crossed often to do so especially in the first couple of weeks
after the tsunami. But there are some walls that tsunamis cannot break.
Vimal Nathan, Director, NESA Bangalore recounted the story of a
fisherman’s bitterness. “I lost everything. I lost family members. I lost
my boats and nets. I can learn to deal with this world. How can I deal
with a world that buries my people with Dalits?”
In Aceh, Indonesia, the military have made it clear that aid workers are
there on sufferance and no tsunami is to interfere with the army’s
daylight killings. Aid workers can either register a strong protest on the
risk of being sent away from crucial work or close their eyes to human
right violations.
Nothing to lose?
Inequalities that existed before the disaster are magnified after the
disaster. Women, the aged, children and people with disabilities continue
to be marginalized. An already hostile world becomes more complicated to
navigate. The delegates talked of the widespread differences in aid
allocation and distribution. The poorest of the tsunami affected areas,
pointed out Saulina Arnold of the Tsunami Relief and Rehabilitation
Committee, have received the least compensation. In that peculiar
discipline called bureaucratic common sense, there is no need to
compensate those who did not lose anything. So the man who lost three
boats eventually gets money to buy new boats but what of the men who until
that Sunday morning were the ones who actually took the boats out to sea?
Dr. Balaji Sampath the Tamil Nadu Science Forum said with a still-startled
air, “There is no department to deal with the loss of livelihood of
agricultural labour. In a country where 40 per cent of the population is
agricultural labour.” At the same time in many tsunami-affected places
NGO salaries have shot up by as much as 1000 per cent in the three months
after the tsunami. And NGOs that came in post-tsunami rarely hire from the
local populations.
“The tremendous generosity and solidarity expressed by people the world
over and the massive flow of assistance to the affected countries should
have led to a process towards achieving a higher standard of living for
affected people,” said Sarath Fernando of MONLAR, Sri Lanka. The
participants of the conference warmly agreed that the relief measures must
not merely aim to restore the communities to their pre-tsunami condition.
Sarvodaya, a key organization in Sri Lanka has already laid plans to use
the tsunami relief operations for Deshodaya or a national
reawakening.
But one point of deeply troubling inequity was brought up by aid workers
over and over again at the consultation. According to funding policy the
millions of dollars being pumped in must go exclusively to the tsunami
victims. Never mind that aid has been withdrawn from Africa and Latin
America where it is needed just as much. So as goodie trucks pass through
areas of Sri Lanka people affected by decades of war cannot stake claims.
Aid workers talk of the excruciating task of distributing materials among
the tsunami victims while their just as desperately poor neighbours look
on. “When thinking of how much money is allocated to tsunami relief, we
need to remember that 30,000 children around the world die of preventable
diseases everyday,” pointed out Dr. Unnikrishnan PV, Action Aid
International.
The tightrope of the mind
Aid workers declared that this was the first time that there had been such
popular emphasis on psycho-social care. For the survivors of the tsunami,
the landscape had been rendered unfamiliar and untrustworthy overnight.
Psycho-social care would certainly be beneficial but what would be the
nature of this care? How would this fit into the culture of the survivor
communities? Insights and debates were varied. Many agreed that
psycho-social care should be planned for groups and communities and
perhaps not individuals as in traditional Western psychotherapy. Though
the work of institutions such as NIMHANS, Bangalore after the tsunami were
applauded, scepticism abounded about the competence of some who were
riding “the psycho-social bandwagon.” Is psycho-social care less
beneficial if the source is non-medical or non-secular? Is support
automatically rendered suspect because it comes from a monk or a priest?
Introspection awaits the aid worker.
Beaches of discontent
In India, Sri Lanka and other nations debates have been raging around the
creation of buffer zones and coastal regulation zones. In the 20-20 vision
of hindsight it seems obvious that people should not have been ever
allowed to set up home and business on the beach. While conservators were
referring to complex and long-term measures to protect the coastal
environment, governments cheerfully latched on to the idea of evicting
people from beachfront real estate. For their own safety. People who have
lived on the coasts for generations and hardly see the seaside as a great
place to get a tan are now being told by governments across South Asia to
move anywhere between a 100 metres to 500 metres away from the sea. Even
if one attributes solid gold intentions to the establishment the fact
remains that these countries do not have the land to relocate the
displaced.
The question of housing remains complicated. Aid workers recount with
irony that they were told there is a time and place for consulting people
and right now isn’t the time. So people are stuck in asbestos topped ovens
in tropical weather. In some places it has been the fear of fire or the
sea that led to the popular thatched roof houses being replaced. But if
people are not using them it becomes clear that here is another instance
of good intentions being just not enough.
The ethical and practical concerns of dealing with what Thomas Siebert of
Medico International called a ‘constellation of suffering’ remains rocky.
However, documents such as the Chennai Declaration could spark more
introspection, discussion and useful insights.
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