As they marched past the hotels, a young man in a white T-shirt with a red megaphone led the demostrators in a call-and-response. "We don't want, we don't want..." he called out, and the crowd shouted back, "Tourist hotels!" then he shouted, "Whites..." and they cried, "Get out!" "We do want, we do want..." and the answers came flying: "Our land back!" "Our homes back!" "A fishing port!" "Our aid money!" "Famine, famine!" he shouted, and the crowd replied, "Fisher people are facing famine!"
Outside the gates of the district government, leaders of the march accused their elected representatives of abandonment, of corruption, of spending aid money meant for the fishing people "on dowries for their daughters and jewelry for their wives." They spoke of special favors handed out to the Sinhalese, of discrimination against Muslims, of the "foreigners profiting from our misery."
It hadn't started this way. When Kumari first came to the east coast in the days after the tsunami, none of the official aid had arrived yet. That meant everyone was a relief worker, a medic, a gravedigger. The ethnic barriers that had divided this region suddenly melted away. "The Muslim side was running to the Tamil side to bury the dead," she recalled, "and the Tamil people were running to the Muslim side to eat and drink. People from the interior of the country were sending two lunch parcels each day from each house, which was alot because they were very poor. It was not to get anything back; it was just the feeling 'I have to support my neighbor; we have to support the sisters, the brothers, the daughters, the mothers.' Just that."
Similar cross-cultural aid was breaking out across the country. Tamil teenagers drove their tractors from the farms to help find bodies. Christian children donated their school uniforms to be turned into white Muslim funeral shrouds, while Hindu women gave their white saris. It was if this invasion of salt water and rubble was so humblingly powerful that, in addition to grinding up homes and buckling highways, it also scrubbed away intractable hatreds, blood feuds and the tally of who last killed whom. For, Kumari, who had done years of frustrating work with peace groups trying to bridge the divides, it was overwhelming to see such tragedy met with such decency. Instead of endlessly talking about peace, Sri Lankans, in the moment of greatest stress, were actually living it.
It also seemed that the country could count on international support for its recovery efforts. At first, the help wasn't coming from governments, which were slow to respond, but from individuals who saw the disaster on TV: schoolchildren in Europe held bake sales and bottle drives, musicians organized star-studded concerts, religious groups collected clothes, blankets and money. Citizens then demanded that their governments match their generousity with official aid. In six months, $13 billion was raised-a world record.
In the first months, much of the reconstruction money reached its intended recipients: NGOs and aid agencies brought emergency food and water, tents and temporary lean-tos; rich countries sent medical teams and supplies. The camps were built as a stop-gap, to give people a roof while permanent homes were constructed. There was certainly enough money to get those homes built. But when I was in Sri Lanka six months later, progress had all but stopped; there were almost no permanent homes, and the temporary camps were starting to look less like emergency shelters and more like entrenched shantytowns.
Aid workers complained that the Sri Lankan government was putting up roadblocks at every turn-first declaring the buffer zone, then refusing to provide alternative land to build on, then commissioning an endless series of studies and master plans from outside experts. As the bureaucrats argued, survivors of the tsunami waited in the sweltering inland camps, living off rations, too far from the ocean to begin fishing again. While the delays were often blamed on "red tape" and poor management, there was in fact far more at stake.
previous thread.. tsunami part one
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2706641&mesg_id=2706641You know, part of the program is to stop people from helping each other. they did it in Iraq, they did it in NO and they did it after 911 "Go shopping".. People help each other for free. That takes the PROFIT out of it.
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