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USAID Information:
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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
IN FOCUS: TSUNAMI REPORT
In this section:
Swift Relief for Sri Lanka’s 600,000 Displaced
U.S., Japan Tsunami Warnings To Protect Indian
Ocean Region
Teachers, Imams Trained to Deal With Children’s
Trauma
Swift Relief for Sri Lanka’s 600,000 Displaced
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Amina Umma, 55, and her granddaughter stand in the
rubble of their home in Kalmunai, Sri Lanka. “We
know we cannot live within 100 meters of the sea, but
we have no other place to live,” she said. “If
the government gives us land 300 or 400 meters inland,
we will accept.”
Ben Barber, USAID |
AMPARA, Sri Lanka—Abdul Kafoor, 36, stands in
front of a tent with his two surviving children and tells
how the giant wave on Dec. 26 carried off his wife and two
other children.
Each night he goes away from the sea, which still terrifies
him and his daughters, to sleep with a family whose house
was not damaged.
But like hundreds of villagers in Kalmunai, they do not
want to be “in the way” of their hosts, so each
day they return to the rubble of their homes.
Some have cash-for-work jobs sponsored by USAID, cleaning
up schools, fixing roads, setting up water systems, digging
drainage ditches for the next rainy season, or building garbage
enclosures.
Kafoor, a fisherman, says he is ready to move away from
the sea if the government decides to ban all houses within
100 yards, as expected.
“Last night there was a panic, and every-one ran out
of their homes because of a rumor another tsunami was coming,”
he said Feb. 12.
And, as daughters Karmil, 9, and Fazna, 8, held close to
him, he asked: “How can I work and bring up two children?”
U.S. relief to Sri Lanka was swift because USAID has had
a mission in the country for more than 40 years—a team
familiar with the issues in this multiethnic island, where
60,000 have died since 1983 in a separatist insurrection by
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
A shaky ceasefire in the past three years between the government
and the Tigers allowed cooperation in relief efforts for Tamil
tsunami victims in areas of the east and north controlled
by the LTTE.
USAID, however, remains barred from direct contacts with
the Tigers, who are on the State Department terrorist list.
After the tsunami hit, specialists such as Bill Berger of
the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance raced to Colombo
from his post in Nepal to help the Sri Lankan government.
“The government has not had an experience like this,”
said Berger. “We’ve been through this a lot.”
Tsunami waves generated by the magnitude 9 earthquake under
the sea off Sumatra hit around much of this island nation’s
coastline, killing 31,000, leaving 5,000 missing, and displacing
600,000.
The tourist regions of the southwest and south were less
damaged than other regions and have already had major rehabilitation,
as Sri Lankan and foreign aid agencies rushed to restore the
economic engine of tourism.
Most severely affected was this eastern region of Ampara,
where densely populated fishing villages were inundated and
more than 100,000 people were displaced into schools, places
of worship, and tent camps.
As one travels along the coast one finds shattered boats—the
vital tools the area’s fishermen need to restore their
livelihoods. One of the fiberglass outrigger boats, broken
in half by the tsunami, has a USAID sticker on its hull. It
was provided as part of a program by the Office of Transition
Initiatives (OTI) just a few months before the tsunami.
Wayne Brook of OTI had been living for two years in Ampara
when the tsunami hit, and has already pledged to work with
fishermen to replace all the USAID-funded boats destroyed
or damaged by the tsunami.
He described the actions he took in the aftermath: “We
shifted from transition to relief right away—gave grants
for hospital equipment, which was shipped from Colombo right
away,” he said.
Next, the USAID contractor supplied generators and water
pumps to camps and schools where 150,000 displaced persons
were sheltering. Then hand tools and equipment were supplied
to local NGOs to clear roads and public facilities.
The Agency then helped groups of mainly ethnic Sinhalese
volunteers come to the east coast from the south to do cleanup.
Brook said that because the victims were mainly the minority
Tamil community, it was important to have the two groups work
together on cleanup. Brook then offered grants to hire excavators,
front-end loaders, and trucks for the cleanup.
Other projects include providing latrines; building temporary
schools; fixing school desks and chairs; and supplying schools
and government offices with photocopiers, printers, and computers.
The U.S. relief effort was greatly enhanced by the U.S.
Marines, who supplied speedy helicopter airlift for supplies
in the early days of the crisis. Other aid came through private
NGOS such as CARE and OXFAM, while foreign donors such as
Japan and the European Union also helped out.
However the initial response was made by Sri Lankans themselves,
such as Senthurajah Shanmugam, 49, chief coordinator of a
group of 14 local NGOs working along the coastal villages
in Ampara Province with support from the United Nations, USAID,
and other aid agencies.
As soon as the tsunami hit, he enlisted the help of a motorcycle
driver and found a badly injured woman. While rushing to find
aid for her, the motorcycle was hit by a wave while crossing
a causeway. After Shanmugam grabbed a stone marker, a passing
villager gave him his daughter to protect as he clung to the
stone. Shanmugam and the girl survived; the girl’s father
also survived after being washed into a lagoon, but the motorcycle
driver was never found.
Now the NGOs are fanning out among the displaced people
to collect reports on their needs.
“It will take five years to recover from this,”
Shanmugam said.
U.S., Japan Tsunami Warnings To Protect Indian Ocean Region
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Amidst the wreckage of Banda Aceh left by the Dec.
26 tsunami, a cleanup crew made up of survivors whose
homes were destroyed is working to remove debris, funded
by USAID. About 1,000 bodies a day were still being
discovered under the wreckage in mid-February.
Ben Barber, USAID |
The United States and Japan will begin to provide tsunami
warnings to the Indian Ocean countries next month, while plans
go ahead on a new warning system for the region.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and Japan’s
Meteorolog-ical Agency will distribute tsunami alerts to Indian
Ocean countries after analyzing quakes in the region, agency
official Osamu Kamigaichi said in Tokyo Feb. 17.
USAID helped establish a tsunami warning system for Chile
and Peru in the early 1990s. Since the Dec. 26 tsunami, Agency
officials have been attending meetings in Asia on setting
up a new warning system for the Indian Ocean.
Currently, a tsunami warning system operates in the Pacific.
Sensors on the ocean floor detect the movement of tsunamis
through deep water and signal the Hawaii center, which alerts
warning systems in 26 countries.
Continuing anxiety and panic has affected many of the tsunami
survivors, who fear to rebuild, return to their work as fishermen,
and remain near the sea. A warning system could help eliminate
those fears.
FrontLines Editorial Director Ben Barber traveled in February
to Aceh, Indonesia, and Ampara, Sri Lanka, to prepare these
reports on U.S. and other aid to relief and recovery operations
in areas hardest hit by the Dec. 26 tsunami
Teachers, Imams Trained to Deal With Children’s Trauma
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia—Giant waves that shattered
families and homes Dec. 26 also shattered the peace of mind
for survivors—above all the hundreds of thousands of
children who have yet to establish the confidence of adult
life—and aid agencies are trying to cope with their psychological
trauma.
In Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand, children are afraid
to go to school, to be near the water, and to go to sleep
at night, say psychiatrists and healthcare workers.
“Some hear screaming voices calling out ‘Save
us! Save us!’” said psychiatrist Syed Arshad Husain,
professor of child psychiatry at the University of Missouri,
after training teachers and healthcare workers in Banda Aceh
and Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Husain and two psychologists trained 130 Indonesian health
workers how to recognize and cope with abnormal depression,
posttraumatic stress disorder (PSTD), and psychoses resulting
from the tsunami.
While some degree of sadness and grief is normal after such
devastating experiences and losses, Husain focuses on cases
where children cannot function at all and may even harm themselves
or others.
Suicide has been reported among survivors, as well as hysteria,
panic, aggression, bedwetting, and avoidance of water. Even
flushing a toilet creates panic. And helicopters delivering
relief sound so much like the tsunami that it terrifies children.
After working with children in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, Husain developed a program to help local health
workers identify severe cases and treat them with counseling,
support, mental exercises that relax the survivors, and, finally,
drugs that prevent anxiety and depression.
He said that in developing countries it may not be feasible
to provide such medication.
The training sessions were sponsored by his university as
well as NGOs, including Mercy Malaysia and Doctors Worldwide.
At a tent camp for tsunami survivors spread around the base
of a television tower in Banda Aceh, another child psychiatrist
was also training teachers and healthcare workers how to identify
and treat traumatized children.
Dr. Indrati Suraputra was sent by the Ministry of Health
from Jakarta to prepare for the problems only slowly emerging
as survivors move from the numbness of escaping sudden death
to the realization of the huge losses they have endured. In
addition, she fears that when the survivors leave the community
of support they have in the displacement camps, they may experience
more sharply any latent problems.
Financed by the World Health Organization and working with
the International Organization for Migration, she has also
been training imams, the Muslim clerics.
Tengku Asmidin, 26, a young imam who took Suraputra’s
training course, said “In our religion, we never stop
learning.”
“Now I learn to understand people better. I can now
not just give advice on religion, but on psychological fields.”
The imam shares the losses of his flock: he was also displaced
by the tsunami and has lost many of his relatives.
“According to my new knowledge [from the training],
there are some cases of PSTD and some panic disorder among
mainly women. They are turning towards religion to cope. With
some knowledge of psychology I will do a much better job of
helping them.”
Some Islamic clerics had said that the tsunami was a punishment
from God because people were not being good Muslims. Asmidin
rejected that approach, admitting: “I am different from
other imams because I read a lot.”
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