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TSUNAMI-IMPACT: Tamil Group Offers Alternative to Sauna-Like Tents

Marwaan Macan-Markar

VATHTHIRAYAN, Sri Lanka, Feb 15 2005 (IPS) - For the past week, Thurai Chandrakumar has led a gang of 11 men in a construction spree aimed at building shelters with local conditions in mind. Here, the day gets progressively hotter and by mid-morning temperatures in this village are almost furnace-like.

The 25 shelters that have mushroomed in this village along the northern coast of Sri Lanka have ample ventilation near the roof to let the wind circulate and allow heat to escape.

Each structure is held up by aluminum poles, has a roof of thatched coconut palms and a wall made of cement blocks and tin sheets.

”These are better for the people and will be more comfortable than those…,” said Chandrakumar, stopping suddenly in the middle of his sentence, as he was lining up cement blocks near an opening that was to serve as the entrance to a shelter.

By ”those” he meant the tents spread out in an open area nearby. They had been distributed by a U.N. agency to shelter the hundreds of people in this village who lost their homes to the devastating tsunami that struck in late December.

Vaththirayan, east of Sri Lanka’s northern city of Jaffna, has acquired an image typical of the small fishing villages that were flattened by the tsunami along Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern coastline. Row after row of white tents have come up in an area covered with sea sand and surrounded by shrubs, patches of weeds and the odd palm tree.

Close to 38,000 people are estimated to have died when the tsunami hit this Indian Ocean island on Dec. 26 and nearly 800,000 people lost their homes. Sri Lanka was the second worst affected of the 12 countries struck by the tsunami, which killed over 220,000 people.

Sivakumar Saritha has good reason to agree with Chandrakumar. For the 22-year-old mother has found the conditions in the tent unbearable. ”It gets very hot and there is no air inside,” said Saritha, whose home was crushed by the tsunami. ”I cannot be in the tent during the day.”

Saritha’s view is shared by others forced to live in tents in her village, which is in an area controlled by the Tamil Tiger rebels, and in other tsunami affected communities along Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern coastline.

Yet for now, a reprieve from tents that have become hot houses due to the harsh tropical climate is not available to all. The fortunate few who may be offered alternate emergency accommodation – like the ones Chandrakumar and his men are building – need to live in the areas under the grip of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Since it is in these LTTE-held stretches, which include a large chunk of northern Sri Lanka and slices in the east and south-east of the South Asian island, that a concerted effort is taking shape to offer a more comfortable local housing alternative to the tents.

The idea grew out of a mix of circumstances. It included complaints from the tsunami- affected Tamils and a search for an indigenous alternative to the tents by a group of Tamil expatriates who had flown in to help the premier non-governmental body operating in rebel- held territory, the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO).

”The Western nations that supplied tsunami relief had this crash-programme mentality in introducing the tents,” one of the expatriates, a balding 60-year-old chartered engineer from London, told IPS on condition of anonymity. ”It was a quick fix that did not meet the local people’s needs.”

He is part of a team that designed these ”livable” temporary structures using local material. ”The people will be more accustomed to these 18 feet by 12 feet (5.5 meters by 3.6 meters) structures,” added the engineer. ”They can take the material with them when time comes to building their homes again.”

Across much of rural Sri Lanka, in fact, poor farming families live in huts that have thatched roofs and walls made of wattle and brick.

And at the TRO’s headquarters in Kilinochi, the major town in the rebel-held north, plans are underway to build over 10,000 thatched-roof shelters. The shelters in Vaththirayan are the first of 300 being built in the initial phase.

”This is part of our commitment to help the people recover from the tsunami,” Lawrence Christy, director of the TRO’s planning division, said in an interview. ”It will be a step towards returning them to normalcy.”

Yet Christy, a former member of the Tamil rebels, admits that the TRO will not be able to meet all the demands for indigenous housing alternatives that it receives – namely finding homes for all the ” ‘450,000 people displaced by the tsunami in the north and east.”

That, however, has not dampened Christy’s determination, since the even marginal success at offering a more comfortable living alternative to the tsunami-affected people is loaded with political implications.

At stake is the need for the TRO – and by extension the LTTE-run parts of northern and eastern Sri Lanka – to demonstrate an air of efficiency in responding to the humanitarian crisis caused by the tsunami.

It is up against the LTTE’s foe, the Sri Lankan government and by extension the Sri Lankan bureaucracy. In early February, a senior government official admitted that the bureaucracy had failed the tsunami victims, since ”70 percent of the displaced people are still waiting for aid.”

And the village where Chandrakumar and his team of masons have been toiling, under a fierce sun, is on the battlefront in the fight over who best can deliver relief to civilians affected by the December tsunami.

For women like Saritha, though, the shelters being constructed in the Vaththirayan have a different meaning: they offer hope that the days of heat and uncertainty are drawing to an end. ”The tents reminded us of the tsunami every day. That we had lost our home,” she said.