Deconstructing Tsunami Aid
Manori Wijesekera
Colombo, (Women`s Feature Service) - Yenni Maulia, Sevlam, Mala, Heshani,
Thalainathan Theeban, Jantakarn Thep-Chuay and Sanan Kla-Thalae and Putri-all between the ages of eight and 16 - live in different countries and have not met each other. Most have not travelled beyond their native village. But their lives and their impressions were an important part of a multi-media initiative on tsunami victims. `Children of Tsunami` - a project conceived and implemented by TVE Asia Pacific, a regional communications organisation based in Sri Lanka, involved following the lives of these eight children, their families and wider communities for a period of ten months beginning February 2005.
The multi-country, multi-media project included monthly five-minute video reports on each child for 10 months, as well as an hour-long documentary `Children of Tsunami: The Journey continues` recording the highs and lows of the children`s journey.
?We lost our house, my two sisters, other members of the family and the places where we worked and played. The tsunami wiped out everything. There`s this feeling of sadness, of grief. I can`t express all of these feelings in words,? says Yenni, 15, who had unsuccessfully tried to hold onto her four-year-old sister Indah Nurmasitah, when the tsunami struck their home in Aceh province in Indonesia in December 2004. Aceh was one of the worst hit areas, with only a handful of buildings left standing. Yenni also lost her one-year-old baby sister to the waves.
Jantakarn Thep-Chuay, 8, better known as Beam in her neighbourhood, talks about her father while playing with his shoes. ?On that Sunday, the day there was a wave, my dad wore his tennis shoes,? she explains. But she believes that a phone call her mother received on Sunday evening, was from her father. ?He called at 8 pm that night. Why did he call at that time? He was already dead, wasn`t he? How could he make a call that night while I was hiding on the mountain??
Beam`s father, Sukroak, was one of thousands of Thais and foreign tourists killed on that fateful day. Almost 14 months after the disaster, his body has still not been identified.
?With over 300,000 people killed, thousands gone missing and millions displaced in a dozen countries on the Indian Ocean rim, the Asian Tsunami became one of the worst disasters of all time,? says TVE Asia Pacific`s CEO, Nalaka Gunawardene. ?But as with every other disaster, the news media`s interest lasted only for a short period. After a few days of saturation coverage, news agencies, network television and the online media drifted away to other emerging stories. Only a handful of reporters spent more time, trying to find new angles in a very widely covered story on an epic scale.?
Adds Gunawardene, Executive Producer of `Children of Tsunami`, ?But we knew that the story was far from over for millions of affected people and their families. Long after journalists and television cameras departed, children, women and men were still struggling to recover from the cruel blow the sea delivered unexpectedly on December 26, 2004. The `Children of Tsunami` communication initiative aimed to document how affected families were rebuilding and returning to normalcy. We wanted to personalise the mass of statistics, aid pledges and recovery plans, so we looked at how all this affects eight children, their immediate families and communities.?
Yenni and Beam were joined in the project by Putri (from Indonesia, 8 years old), Kla-Thalae (from Thailand, 16 years old), Mala and Selvam (from India, 11 and 13 years old respectively), and Heshani and Theeban (from Sri Lanka, 13 and 14 years old respectively). Each child and their families had suffered great loss and upheaval in their lives due to the tsunami. The families were identified following a careful search by the local production teams, who were in turn chosen by TVE Asia Pacific to tell the stories from a local perspective. Although the project was supported by INGOs like Oxfam, Helpage International and UNDP, TVE Asia retained its independence in the projection of the stories.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the families` participation in this 10- month project was that they participated in the project willingly and with full, informed consent. They received no financial or material benefits from their participation. The children felt that their participation in the project would enable the world to see things as they really were in their communities, and give them a ?voice to the world? as one parent described it. Yenni complained that because her father couldn`t find work, she may have to drop out of school, while Selvam was happy that the new boats given to their village would help his father fish again.
Although named `Children of Tsunami`, TVE Asia Pacific has been careful not to make this a story about children. The children play the role of guides, and they take the viewer from the immediate upheavals and struggles of their family to wider social and economic issues facing their community. This was not an investigative or research project, but many issues emerged which are not easily overlooked.
One such issue was that there was unequal and irresponsible distribution of the large amount of aid and donations received by each of the affected countries. There were also clear disparities in the distribution of aid within a country: in Sri Lanka, Heshani and her family from the south of the country moved into a new house built by a Scandinavian charity. Theeban and his family, living in the east of the island and in the area hardest-hit by the Tsunami, are still living in a temporary shelter and his brothers have been sent off to live with a relative, while his father is still looking for a permanent job.
In India, Selvam`s village received new fishing boats and nets which has helped the families to recover their livelihood, even though they continue to live in temporary housing. But just a few hundred miles away, Mala and her community have not seen any aid or assistance. They are literally, starving, because they are dalits - the lowest in the caste hierarchy.
Further, the project stories indicate that governments were ineffective in the face of the magnitude of the disaster. International aid agencies, the dispensing arm of the large amounts of global aid, were bureaucratic and slow to implement long-term reconstruction. Neither governments nor aid agencies consulted the local communities on their needs and their traditions, resulting in large-scale failure of rebuilding projects.
In several affected areas, families lost their livelihood, and many of the children lost their schools. Some dropped out, as their families couldn`t afford to send them to school. Others struggled in temporary schools. Family structures were changed, with some families being split-up, some grandparents stepping into fill the void left by parents killed in the tsunami and some left to manage their families as single parents. Entire communities were relocated. Some communities stopped working, and lived off donations from local and international NGOs.
But the `Children of Tsunami` project is not just about negativity and gloom. As we watch the progress of the families through the first 10 months of rebuilding their lives, there are instances of remarkable resilience and hope in the face of the most daunting obstacles. There are glimpses ofheroism and courage, which were missed by the conventional media.