Guest Viewpoint: After relief, the real job lies ahead

By Brent Hample

January 24, 2005--It is hard for me to imagine a wall of water 25 feet high. It is even harder for me to imagine it crashing down on small thatched huts, tourists and children.

It is now almost four weeks after the Asian tsunami. According to Reuters news service, more than 226,000 are dead and more than 1.5 million people are homeless. The figures keep climbing each day.

Relief teams and agencies that were able to get to easily accessible areas around the Indian Ocean are completing their work, gradually closing refugee camps and moving out.

The survivors and relief workers are exhausted from the emotional trauma and difficult work of daily survival. After relief teams depart from an area, the survivors are left to piece together their homes, communities and livelihoods. Now is the time for endurance to conduct the long-term work of reconstruction.

Disaster relief is high-profile work. Reconstruction is not. There will be very few, if any, benefit concerts or telethons for reconstruction efforts. Disaster relief is short-term. Rebuilding communities will take months and years.

In the past 20 years, India Partners, a local relief and development organization, through its network of indigenous partner agencies in India, has provided disaster relief to tens of thousands of victims after three large cyclones, the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake, and now the Asian tsunami. After each disaster, our focus gradually changed from relief to reconstruction and community development.

Here is part of a recent e-mail from the leader of one of our group's agencies in India:

"People are sharing their experiences of the tsunami that touch the hearts of the people. Thousands of people who live in these coastal villages depend upon the sea for their living. Many lost their small and big nets, many small and big boats were destroyed in the sea and many boats and motor boats thrown out far away by the tidal wave.

"These people are looking for somebody's hand for food and for clothes every day. I feel so burdened when I met the grand-mums and grandfathers who lost their sons in the sea and the young married girls who lost their husbands in the sea, I was crying to God and praying God to deliver them from the great sorrow and agony. Our relief teams are not able to sleep properly nor eat enough food after hearing the people's experiences of the tsunami.

"India Partners is doing great help for these people. We are working hard in these villages and helping them by word and deed, because of the great prayers and the great financial support from India Partners. We are grateful to all who are supporting India Partners. All their prayers and support is most valuable and we are prayerfully helping the victims of the tsunami.

"As we are continually working village by village, we are coming to know the experiences that people had of the tsunami, which is breaking down our hearts. They will be starving until they start going into the sea to catch fish. Many villagers are having one small meal a day and some do not have firewood to cook rice and some do not have vessels to cook rice, so many ways these people are suffering."

Relief teams will eventually disband and depart the disaster areas. But, those involved in development will stay to help the devastated communities rebuild. India Partners is now beginning to focus its tsunami work on reconstruction projects such as rebuilding huts, fixing boats and replacing nets that were lost in the tsunami. Families in fishing villages along the Indian Ocean coast depend on the sea for their livelihood, but without boats and nets, they will not be able to feed their children.

For most relief agencies, the work is slowly winding down. But for development agencies the work is just beginning. They are in it for the long haul.

Brent Hample is executive director of India Partners, a Eugene-based organization that has collected $96,000 for tsunami relief.