PHA-Exchange> PHM Tsunami meeting last month

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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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