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TSUNAMI-IMPACT: Counselling With a Local Sri Lankan Touch

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka, Feb 22 2005 (IPS) - When Carolina Delima walks through a refugee camp set up in the centre of this town in eastern Sri Lanka, a cry of glee pours forth from children with names like Vinod, Subodan and Sivaraj.

They know that playtime has arrived. And they gather around the 21-year-old Delima, who looks much younger than her age. Within minutes, Delima takes her place under a spacious tree providing shade from the late afternoon sun to lead the children in songs, story-telling and, of course, games.

The nearly 100 children that cherish the two hours before sunset with Delima are from the 410 families who have been staying at the refugee camp, an empty warehouse often used to store rice, for nearly two months. They are the lucky survivors who fled their homes in Batticaloa when the tsunami struck on Dec. 26.

”At the beginning, some children were scared and needed encouragement to play,” says Delima, whose is part of a team attached to the local branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) helping the tsunami victims.

An estimated 2,840 people were killed by the rampaging sea in the entire Batticaloa district, while some 61,912 were rendered homeless. The toll across Sri Lanka, one of the 12 countries in South and South-east Asia devastated by the December tsunami, was 38,000 deaths and 800,000 people displaced.

Before nature struck, this town had to weather the bombs and bullets from a two-decade- long ethnic conflict between the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels and government troops. Some of its walls still bear the scars of that conflict, now on hold due to ceasefire agreement struck three years ago.

But the rounds that Delima and her peers have been making for over a month to engage with the child survivors of the tsunami have broader implications.

At issue is whether such informal efforts by locals conversant with the language of the survivors – Tamil – are better for the victims distressed by the killer waves than the aggressive push for a clinical approach, such as direct counselling by psychologists.

The case to counsel the tsunami victims is being urged by an increasing army of foreign volunteers prepared to fly into towns like Batticaloa to help those ”traumatised” by the natural disaster. Even sections of the Western media covering the tsunami’s impact have revealed a bias towards the clinical approach, says a social worker here.

Typical of the offers from abroad was the promise of a rapid counselling session by a group bringing in psychologists from the United States. The brisk schedule they had in mind for the victims included a team of counsellors handling 25 ”patients at a time” over a five-hour period. The aim was to counsel 100 victims per day.

”These offers will do more damage. Helping the victims cannot be done by these fly-in-fly- out people,” Dr. Mahesan Ganesan, a consultant psychiatrist at the main hospital in this town, tells IPS.

Ganesan advocates an approach rooted in strong bonds and trust, for which community workers like Delima are pivotal. ”The person who wants to help has to be someone who knows the victim. A long-term relationship has to be built.”

Sensitivity to the local traditions is as important, he adds. ”In Western culture they believe that you are not supposed to suffer. It is a right not to suffer. But we take a different view, where mourning is expected and prescribed.”

Few are more qualified to make such case in this region than Ganesan, who is the only psychiatrist covering Sri Lanka’s entire eastern province, which has a population of 1.4 million people. This Indian Ocean island’s east coast, in fact, took the harshest beating from the tsunami.

Throwing their weight behind Ganesan’s call for local social workers to help the distressed are groups like the Eastern Self-Reliant Community Awakening Organisation (ESCO), which has been working on the social and psychological problems of children affected by the ethnic conflict in this region.

”Listening and responding are the best way to help the tsunami survivors feeling distressed, ” says Sinnathamby Spiritheyon, director of ESCO, in an interview. ”For this, language is very important. So much will be lost in translation and it could make those who need help uncomfortable.”

In fact a week after the tsunami, an ESCO team of 74 social workers began working with child survivors in refugee camps north of this town. ”They know that caring for these children will take a long time,” adds Spiritheyon. ”We are prepared to work with them in our play groups like we did during the conflict.”

That mothers in the camp Delima visits welcome this local, familiar touch was obvious. ”We feel comfortable talking to our people who come to help,” says Elizabeth Mary, an ageing mother of four wearing a nightdress. ”It is not easy with outsiders. Sometimes it can be very difficult.”