Sri Lanka

Posted August 17, 2009 by Dan Sadowsky

A Can-Do Spirit

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Children, Education, Health

The organic garden Mercy Corps helped build at Sandunika's school is "a very big deal," she says, "because we are using compost, which means we're reusing something we already had, so it saves us money and it's organic." Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Nalagama Sinhala Junior School operates on something less than a shoestring. There's no library, no computers, no science lab. Recently, the older students performed a chemistry experiment involving oxygen using a plastic bucket rather than a glass beaker.

But the school does have a can-do spirit.

Mercy Corps recently rehabilitated what was the school's lone latrine and built two more toilets just behind the classrooms. We also installed two water taps and roof gutters, cleared land for a playground, established organic gardens and a composting programme, and helped school officials instill a new cleanliness ethic with handwashing posters and a student-led committee on hygiene.

It's all part of an effort to improve access to clean water and sanitation in five impoverished communities along Sri Lanka's still-recovering southern coast. Across the island, which is about the size of West Virginia, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed 35,000, destroyed 50,000 homes and caused an estimated £1 billion in damages.

"This is a very poor village," says the school's principal, Premasiri Galapati. "In general, people do something daily just to make some money, mostly paddy farming, some masonry, some general labour. Only a few people have state jobs, and nobody has a lot of land."

The one-building school is arranged in a long, narrow space with temporary walls dividing the classrooms, and a couple of offices on each end. About 70 students attend.

Sandunika, a ninth grader, says she's happy she can now use a clean, girls-only toilet right on school grounds. And thanks to the new water taps, she and her peers wash their hands religiously before and after eating or working in the school's gardens.

Shanti Weerasooriya teaches math to students at Nalagama Sinhala Junior School, an open-air school in tropical Sri Lanka. Mercy Corps helped instill a new cleanliness ethic with new latrines, handwashing taps and an organic gardening system. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

"Of course we knew about handwashing before," she says, "but we didn't know as much as we know now: about mosquitos and waterborne diseases, and how to clean your nails — things like that."

The father of a third-grader at the school, E.P. Pemadasa, says he's seen a big improvement. "There are toilets children can use, good water supply, and a proper playground. We didn't have these things before."

And has he noticed a difference in his son? "Yes, he's cleaner now, and he wants to adjust his habits to what's being done in school. The children are very enthusiastic about doing the things the school teaches. It's made a huge impact."

One Table:  Posted July 24, 2009, 11:32 am by Chandima Arambepola

Welcomed signs in Navgirinagar

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Food/Nutrition, Agriculture

As the clear skies of Ampara and Batticaloa districts in eastern Sri Lanka are quietly invaded by grey, there is talk of rain. Since a majority of these districts’ residents fully or partially dependent on farming for their livelihood, rain — at the right time — is a boon. Rice is a dietary staple for most Sri Lankans, and the majority of the farmers here cultivate rice paddies. Not unlike other countries, rice is cultivated in Sri Lanka using irrigated water collected during the monsoon rains. Unfortunately, with the lack of rains this year some farmers have been forced to abandon their paddy fields.

Last Thursday, Mercy Corps visited Marian Paikyarajah, a beneficiary of the Global Food Crisis Response project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project assists farmers in the short- and medium-term to improve food security and lay the groundwork for long term solutions.

As we near the village of Navagirinagar, the landscape is dominated by mature golden-yellow paddy fields. The slight drizzle that welcomes us is an indication that the time is right for harvesting, which must be completed before the rains turn into the seasonal downpour — the first sign of the end of one cultivation season and start of another.

Paikyarajah has been a farmer almost all his life. He and his family were displaced in early 2007 as intense fighting erupted between the Sri Lankan government forces and the separatist Tamil Tiger rebel group. Returning home in 2008 with the rest of his neighbors, Paikyarajah was soon confronted with another set of challenges.

In southern and eastern Sri Lanka, Mercy Corps is helping promote the "SRI" method of growing rice.
Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Elephants, trying to ensure their own food security, had trespassed their lands and destroyed many of the villagers’ homes. In addition, the area suffers from a trilogy of cascading problems: pervasive snakes, lack of public transportation and no medical facilities. (As a result, normally curable snake bites can cause death in this area.) Nevertheless, Paikyarajah perseveres and is optimistic about his and his family’s future.

Paikyarajah was among those who volunteered to adopt the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) process. SRI is an alternative method of paddy cultivation that Mercy Corps helped to successfully introduce to farmers in the Hambantota district of Sri Lanka in 2007, and has been using in Batticaloa since 2008. SRI requires less water and promotes the usage of organic fertilizer to increase yields and adopts transplanting rather than the traditional broadcasting method to plant rice seeds so it’s ideal for small plots of land. While Paikyarajah had not heard of SRI before, he was keen to test the method.

This field visit, therefore, is significant. With us is Krishnadas, the SRI facilitator who will help Paikyarajah measure and compare the yields to be expected from SRI and normal rice cultivation.

Paikyarajah, accompanied by his son, greets us at the fields. He has cultivated half an acre using SRI. The remainder of his three acres is cultivated in the using the broadcast method. Paikyarajah and Krishnadas randomly pick a spot in the SRI rice field and begin harvesting within the demarcated area. Krishnadas and I count the number of tillers in each SRI stalk. We quickly count far more than what is found in a stalk of rice cultivated using broadcasting.

The stalks are then taken to Paikyarajah’s house nearby and, using a threshing machine, the rice seeds are separated from the stalks. The same process is adopted to collect rice stalks from the rest of the area cultivated under the broadcast methodology.

The process of threshing and separating the hollow seeds from the good seeds takes time, but once the process is over the rice seeds are collected into gunny sacks and weighed. Krishnadas reads the scale and does the calculations to ascertain the yield: From SRI, Paikyarajah can expect a yield of 40 bags per acre (at approximately 66 kilos per bag) whereas under the broadcast method he would only get 29 bags.

With fewer agricultural inputs and using less water, Paikyarajah will secure a better yield from the SRI method. The outcome is good news to Paikyarajah, since he plans to extend the SRI method to at least another half-acre of land during the upcoming cultivation season. Predicting a positive outcome of SRI, he already has been preparing for the next growing season: At a far corner of his land lays a pile of cow dung, ready to be spread as organic fertilizer on a newly planted crop.

Blog Post:  Posted July 8, 2009, 9:34 am by Paul Armour

Drinking water for Sri Lanka's IDPs

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Water/Sanitation, Displacement

We're now supplying filtered drinking water to more than 46,000 displaced people in northern Sri Lanka — and a 100-bed hospital.

These are some of the reconditioned ST1 Water Filtration Units we're using to filter drinking water for more than 46,000 people living in displacement camps in northern Sri Lanka. Photo: Mercy Corps

As of July 1, all four of our large water-filtration units have been installed in one of northern Sri Lanka's largest camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Three are operational, producing clean drinking water to more than 46,000 people between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily. Sri Lanka's water-supply agency provides tankers for us to deliver the water to families.

We're also supplying water to a 100-bed hospital.
 
Mercy Corps and our partner, ISB, currently work in one of the 19 camps in Vavuniya, a town in northern Sri Lanka. Our camp is commonly referred to as Zone 1, and is the second-largest of 19 camp zones.  Zone 1 includes 15,319 families, or a total population of 46,675. 
 
We're continuing to design our hygiene-promotion programme with the Ministry of Health. It's intended to train families on how to prevent waterborne disease in the camp. We expect to roll out the campaign by month's end.
 
Donors gave generously online to get this emergency project off the ground. But we still need your help to do more. Please consider a gift to the Sri Lanka Emergency Fund.

One Table:  Posted June 18, 2009

Farming Rice, Intensively

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Agriculture, Food/Nutrition, Hunger, Rural, Women's Empowerment

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Kanthi Weerasinghe is one of 160 farmers in the village of Yahangala East experimenting with a method of growing rice called SRI, which is short for System of Rice Intensification. As a widowed mother, every little bit of help is welcomed.

For the last five years, since her husband died of a heart attack, Kanthi has been in charge of cultivating three-and-a-half acres of rice paddy. She relies on the harvest — and a small shop in front of her home that sells vegetables and snacks to neighbors and passersby — to sustain her and her two school-age daughters.

Until last year, she and her neighbors have been using what's known as the "broadcast" method of planting rice, which isn't much more than flinging seeds onto a water-soaked field. But, recently, Mercy Corps helped her find a technique that will increase her harvest and improve her family's fortunes...

Read the rest of Kanthi's story — and tales of other women who are working hard for their families — at onetable.mercycorps.org.

Blog Post:  Posted June 16, 2009, 9:44 am by Paul Armour

Providing clean water to Sri Lanka's displaced

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Displacement, Conflict & War

An armed Sri Lankan policeman stands guard behind Tamil families during U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's tour of the refugee camp called Manik Farm on the outskirts of the northern Sri Lankan town of Vavuniya in May 2009. Photo: Reuters/Louis Charbonneau, courtesy www.alertnet.org

Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans are still living in densely populated camps following last month's end to the island's 26-year civil war.

Conditions in the camps are improving, but there's still not enough clean water and safe sanitation, according to the UN.

Mercy Corps is helping to fill these gaps by installing water-filtration systems — together with our local partner, ISB Services Limited — that will meet the daily drinking-water needs of 40,000 camp residents. ITT Watermark supplied the units.

We're also launching an effort to spread good hygiene habits to contain diseases such as typhoid, cholera and dengue fever. The oncoming monsoon season heightens the risk of disease spreading through the camps, and children are among the most vulnerable.

Donors gave generously online to get this emergency project off the ground. But we still need your help to do more.

Additional funding would allow us to build emergency latrines to restore a sense of dignity to the lives of camp residents, and to further guard against the spread of deadly diseases.

Eventually, our focus will turn to families who'll need our help to recover what they've lost and rebuild their lives. Thank you for standing with them in this time of need.

Posted May 18, 2009 by Dan Sadowsky

Sri Lanka's displaced grows to 265,000

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Conflict & War, Displacement, Marginalized Groups

The war in Sri Lanka may appear to be over, but its humanitarian crisis is still unfolding.

In recent months, an estimated 265,000 Tamil civilians have fled the final battleground between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, according to the UN.

Mercy Corps has 90 staff members on the island helping families "build back better" from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In the two hardest-hit coastal areas, Mercy Corps is helping job-rich industries recover and fighting a food crisis that threatens the most vulnerable families.

In the country's north, our team is taking steps to help families uprooted to the Vavuniya district, home to the highest concentration of displacement camps. These sites are "already buckling under the pressure of the existing IDP population," according to the UN. Stocks of food and other critical items are running low.

Our plan is to erect temporary shelters, provide drinking water, build latrines and promote better hygiene practices — and ultimately help families return to their communities and rebuild their lives and livelihoods.

We're doing just that in Sri Lanka's conflict-scarred Eastern Province — helping people recover by providing small-scale rice farmers the tools and financing to improve their yields, and by working with multi-ethnic associations to build trust and lay a foundation for peaceful progress.

Posted April 28, 2009 by Dan Sadowsky

Exodus of IDPs overwhelms northern Sri Lanka

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Conflict & War, Displacement, Emergencies

Mercy Corps is marshaling a humanitarian response to the growing crisis in northern Sri Lanka, where more than 90,000 people have fled fighting between Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army in the past week.

In all, an estimated 190,000 Sri Lankans are living in camps located in government-controlled areas; at least another 50,000 remained trapped inside the conflict zone, according to the UN.

Families escaping the area face overcrowded camps with "overwhelmed" health facilities and a lack of water and sanitation, according to the UN. In the area most densely settled with displaced families, Vavuniya, an average of 18 persons are crammed into tents designed for a family of five, according to the UN's humanitarian team.

Mercy Corps, which has been working in Sri Lanka since 2005, is meeting with government officials and representatives from other humanitarian agencies to determine how we can best contribute to the relief efforts. We have mobilized an emergency-response team within the country and are prepared to begin operations immediately upon request.

Currently, our 90-person team works in the two coastal areas hit hardest by the tsunami to support economic recovery in job-rich industries, support small-scale farmers and mitigate the potential for conflict.

In Sri Lanka's Eastern Province, which has been heavily affected by the country's 26-year civil conflict, we're helping family rice farmers improve their yields by providing high-quality seeds, teaching less-costly farming techniques and improving access to credit. We're also bringing together communities of different ethnicities and faiths to lay the groundwork for a peaceful Sri Lanka.

Posted March 24, 2009 by Dan Sadowsky

Financing Higher Yields

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Agriculture

Thalankudha, Sri Lanka — When I met farmer Suman Suntharalingam in front of his mud-walled home here, he had just returned from selling 15 pounds of long beans and buying fuel for his water pump — two tasks that could be traced back to help he received from Mercy Corps.

Twenty-nine-year-old Suman and his wife, Kavita, 28, coax long beans, eggplant, bitter gourd, and corn out of one-and-a-half acres of sandy soil not far from the aqua-blue waters of the Indian Ocean. They also own a few dairy cows and cultivate a small rice paddy, endeavors that support themselves and their 14-month-old daughter. Last August they received a loan of 15,000 Sri Lankan rupees, or about £73, from a community loan fund set up by Mercy Corps.

The loan fund is administered by a 15-member elected body called the Community Action Group, or CAG. Mercy Corps established the group to guide our post-tsunami investments in Thalankudha. Before choosing to establish the revolving loan fund, the CAG had spent recovery monies on reconstructing roads vital to getting goods to market and on building 30 agricultural wells for the village farmers to share.

A focus on livelihoods

Back in 2004, the tsunami waters didn't quite reach the Sutharalingam's home, but it led household incomes to plummet all along the coast. Thousands of lives were lost, fields were soaked in crop-slaying saltwater, marketplaces were washed away. Ensuring coastal residents recover their livelihoods is the main focus of Mercy Corps' work.

"I applied for a loan more than ten times before this," Suman told me. "Many people visited the plot, but no one came back (to give me the loan)." Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

With their loan, Suman and Kavita purchased bean seeds, fertilizer and, most importantly, a reconditioned water pump.

"Before, the main problem was watering the crops," Suman explained to me at his home, a good walk from his field. "I had to do it by hand, and it was very difficult."

To get the water, he essentially had to dig down into the sand until his shovel reached the water table, scoop the water out with a basketball-sized metal urn he showed us, and laboriously pour it over the crops. Watering this way took four hours. Today, with the water pump, it takes 30 minutes.

With the extra time the couple is devoting more attention to tending their crops — and selling them. They're paying monthly loan payment on time, spending less at the market on vegetables and squeezing more profits from their land.

Improving the farm

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Suman says he plans to use the additional income to work on his unfinished three-year-old home. He wants to order window casings, install wooden doors where corrugated-metal doors are now, and plaster the inside walls. He'd also like to save enough money to start cultivating chilis, which are most costly to grow, but also more profitable.

"I applied for a loan more than ten times before this. Many people visited the plot, but no one came back (to give me the loan)." Did he expected the same result with Mercy Corps? "Yes," he laughs. "I thought I would be disappointed again."

Instead, he and his family found their wishes fulfilled.

Indian Ocean Tsunami: Five Years Later:

Blog Post:  Posted February 19, 2009, 2:24 pm by Dan Sadowsky

Resilience and resourcefulness

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Emergencies, Conflict & War, Agriculture

When I asked Santhinithevi and her husband, Thawaraja (pictured here in front of their pre-tsunami house) what happened to them during the tsunami, she replied, "We hung onto trees and survived." Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Thatcher asked me on our way to the Colombo airport if I had a favorite story from our now-completed travels. I couldn't come up with one; each made its own distinct impression. But in going over all the stories we'd heard, two qualities stood out: resilience and resourcefulness.

We met people who'd survived one of the deadliest natural disasters in history and endured the profound effect it had on Sri Lanka, and who have shown courage and enterprise in their efforts to better their families' lives.

Before coming here, I'd read all about Sri Lanka's tsunami casualty figures. More than 35,000 dead. Nearly 450,000 displaced. Fifty thousand homes gone. An estimated £1 billion in damages.

So I wasn't expecting to feel so stunned at hearing my first survivor story, from a 43-year-old gardener named Santhinithevi. She told me how the wave carried her and her husband away from their home in different directions, and that each survived by clinging for hours to the top of a palm tree. Her two children were safe at school, but her mother, father, sister and several nieces and nephews lost their lives.

"I was building this fence around our property at the time, and I heard a cry at the beach," she told me, and started to giggle. "I thought there was a big catch, and I told my husband to go and try to get some fish."

The couple smiled and chuckled as they recounted their harrowing tale to me, and it was hard to determine whether their laughter helped distance themselves emotionally from the trauma, or was their way of acknowledging an event so surreal that its retelling sounded preposterous -- even to those who'd experienced it.

In other conversations, the tsunami's emotional impact was easier to gauge.

Anushika Magamamudai was all smiles as she showed us the thousands of tiny black and red guppies growing in the cement fish tanks we'd helped her build. The 29-year-old talked about how the tsunami swallowed her father's fishing boat and triggered bizarre behaviour in her chickens, many of which died. I asked if she'd lost family and friends in the tsunami. "Yes," she answered, tearing up and staring silently at the ground. I changed the subject.

Anushika hopes to quadruple the income of her husband, a rickshaw driver, by raising tropical fish for domestic and international sale. Mercy Corps is supporting 50 households with fish, tanks and connections to buyers. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

In Hambantota, Thatcher and I stayed in a beachfront hotel that lost 26 guests and 18 staff members on the morning of December 26, 2004. We arrived at night with advice to get a room far from the sleep-depriving hum of the hotel's generator. But even the generator's decibel level was no match for the thunderous waves on the other side. Staring out at the sea the next morning, I felt a shiver of fear as my eye caught a large wave that appeared to continue rising as it crested. I was trying to imagine what it must have been like to watch the sea attack.

Survival was on the minds of many after the tsunami struck. But it's also top of mind for many in Sri Lanka on any given day. Resourcefulness is a must. The people I met seized on every opportunity to diversify their income streams.

Rathnawathi, for example, tried raising chickens before she enrolled in a Mercy Corps programme that helped her start raising aquarium fish. She continues to run a roadside stall selling rice, coconuts, detergent and other sundries. And when we saw shreds of coconut laid out on a platter outside her house, she explained she was drying the fruits of her backyard trees to sell it to coconut-oil processors.

Sagarika is one of 18 employees at a new coconut-oil factory we financed. She's getting her first paycheck in a decade, but also maintaining her side business sewing floor mats. "I have a lot of work to do for myself and my family," she told me. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Sagarika is a 35-year-old mother of two who is employed full-time at a coconut-oil facility that Mercy Corps financed. Yet in addition to this job, she runs a side business weaving mats from pieces of cloth, and was more interested in telling me about plans to expand her mat-weaving business to erase past debts and pay her children's educational expenses.

Most of the people we met never receive a paycheck, but they have multiple means of making money: driving rickshaw taxis, leasing tractors, raising vegetables or chickens, baking bricks -- and almost always cultivating an acre or two of rice paddy. In a sense, they're all microentrepreneurs. They have the ideas and drive, and need only access to financial services and some technical training to run thriving enterprises.

So although I left Sri Lanka without a single story that stood out from the rest, I did take with me a renewed sense of humility and admiration for those who persevere in far more daunting circumstances than my own. Their potential, however, is still restrained by continuing conflict. The Tamil Tigers may soon be finished as a conventional fighting force, but many of the underlying grievances remain. Observers are quick to point out that a lasting political solution must complement a military victory.

Still, I spoke to Sri Lankans of all ethnicities who expressed a sense of optimism. And Mercy Corps is certainly providing reason for hope. I saw plenty of examples of what it can mean to someone to get a hand up, even one extended halfway around the world.