By Feizal Samath
DAMBULLA, Sri Lanka, Jun 22 2000 (IPS)

Life is tough for women in this northcentral Sri Lankan village, having to cope with drunken husbands and poverty at home, and sexual violence outside.

The few who try to stand up to this are threatened with more violence as Sheela Ratnayake discovered when she tried to help a friend who was raped five years ago while on her way to work in Dambulla, 150 km away from the Sri Lankan capital.

Ratnayake no longer accompanies the victim to the court where the latter had filed a private action against her six attackers. “I wanted to continue going with her to extend moral support to her, but have been advised not to go to the courts,” says Sheela.

“The men (who allegedly raped her) move freely around the village,” she says. The case has dragged on for the past five years.

However, things are changing as women realise that with law enforcers unable to protect them, they will have to help themselves. Now a group of 20 men and women travel with the rape victim to the courts once every three months.

These are village women and workers of a big Sri Lankan NGO, the Women’s Development Centre (WDC) that is showing the women of Dambulla not only how to deal with drunken males and sexual attackers, but ways of adding to the family income and improving the health and educational standards of the community.

The WDC, based in the central Sri Lankan town of Kandy, also arranges legal help for women who face violence in the home or outside. In this and other activities, it works through a smaller people’s group, the Rajarata Women’s Foundation that is based some 70 km away in the northcentral town of Anuradhapura.

The Dambulla women were encouraged to form self-help groups by the Foundation that chose Ratnayake as its local coordinator. One of the biggest problems of Dambulla is alcoholism which hurts women the most, she says.

“Alcoholism is a serious problem and women are the worst off,” she says. Drunken husbands not only waste meagre family incomes on liquor, but beat up their wives.

Last year, angered by the attempts of a drunken man to sexually attack a young girl, the women staged a protest against growing alcoholism in the village.

About 150 women and children, carrying anti-liquor placards had marched to the local police station shouting slogans, demanding closure of liquor shops near the village.

“We need to continue these efforts,” says Ratnayake. The anti- liquor campaign is a high priority for the Rajarata Foundation that works in 35 hamlets with similar self-help groups of nearly 700 women.

“The key to giving women control over their lives is to teach them to help themselves instead of waiting for help. Women must ask, ‘what can we do’, instead of, ‘what can others do for us?’,” she explains.

One of the best ways is to teach women how to be financially independent for which the Rajarata Foundation is helping set up savings and credit groups. Village women contribute amounts as low as half a rupee at the beginning, but the thrift schemes eventually save up large sums.

Loans are given out at an interest that is fixed by the group, but is usually more than 20 percent. Repayment is prompt and defaults unheard of.

The savings groups are helped by the WDC which provides funds to the Rajrata Foundation. “We provide matching credits. If for example, the Foundation is able to save 5,000 rupees (about 70 U.S. dollars), we provide double that amount — 10,000 rupees,” says WDC community development officer.

As in thousands of other Sri Lankan villages, many Dambulla households are headed by war widows who have lost their soldier husbands while battling Tamil Tiger rebels in the nearly two decade-old ethnic conflict in the north and northeast of the Indian Ocean island nation.

The Rajrata Women’s Foundation is training these women in livelihood skills. It also helps illiterate women from low caste families by arranging a basic education for them. “These women don’t have an education and are forced to take up demeaning jobs,” says Ratnayake.

Her group of volunteers has also built 50 toilets in Dambulla and trained 17 village women as pre-school teachers.

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