U of G community members use personal and professional ties to help victims of disaster
BY ANDREW VOWLES
By Jan. 4, the New Year's parcel remained unsent in Jessica Paterson's home. The master's student in rural planning had begun to assemble the package as a belated Christmas gift for a former co-worker in Sri Lanka.
Then she received news of the deadly tsunami generated by a massive undersea earthquake on Dec. 26 that washed away people, homes and entire coastal communities in Sri Lanka and nearly a dozen other countries bordering the Indian Ocean.
More than a week after the disaster struck, Paterson still didn't know what had happened to her friend, merely that the 35-year-old woman had been listed by the government as “missing.” Paterson had grown particularly close to the English teacher, who was her translator during a posting in Sri Lanka four years ago with an international development organization.
Since returning to Canada, Paterson had thought more than once about visiting Southeast Asia again. She may yet return overseas. Quietly, she adds: “I'll wait on the package.”
Instead, like many other U of G community members with personal and professional ties to those countries devastated by the deadly waves, she has thrown herself into fundraising, relief and information-sharing efforts here at home.
One of Paterson's first steps was to open a bank account to collect donations. By the end of last week, the effort had raised more than $3,000 (the account continues to receive donations). By Jan. 4, she had already sent $1,700 to the Sri Lanka Centre for Development Facilitation (SLCDF), a non-governmental organization whose regional office she had worked with in Sri Lanka.
That organization is headed by Wijewickrama Abeydeera, a 2002 rural studies PhD graduate of Guelph. SLCDF serves as the hub of a network of 3,300 community groups and almost 300 non-governmental organizations across the country.
The southern coastal town of Tangalle in which Paterson had worked on capacity-building programs for two nearby fishing villages was among the last in the area to be reached by relief workers because the coastal road had been so badly damaged.
Not knowing initially what had happened to the community was the worst, although she eventually learned that the family she had lived with had survived.
“Everyone that I know, was friends with and worked with, lived within a kilometre of the coast. Entire communities that I worked in are now gone.”
Prof. Jana Janakiram, Rural Extension Studies, was stunned to learn of the scale of the disaster. He says his initial response was: “Why? This country is going through enough already.”
Members of his family living inland were unaffected by the tsunami. Not so for areas on the south coast, where last spring Janakiram had accompanied Abeydeera to view community development projects.
“I don't know what's happened to those projects,” he says, adding that many of the workers lived on-site. “From the media reports, it appears that most of them have been washed away.”
Prof. Deepananda Herath, Agricultural Economics and Business (AE&B), says about $7,000 had been raised by early last week by the Sri Lanka Association for Cambridge, Guelph, Kitchener and Waterloo. He serves as secretary for the organization, which planned to send donations to the SLCDF.
He recalls a 2002 visit to Galle, an area in southern Sri Lanka that was particularly hard-hit. “Will they ever be back to normal?” he says.
Galle is home to the family of Sunil Thrikawala, a 1996 graduate of AE&B and a researcher now working with Prof. Alfons Weersink. Thrikawala just returned to Guelph in the fall with his wife, AE&B professor Jeevika Weerahewa, and their family. He says his parents' home, only about one kilometre from the coast, escaped the waves, although his brother had to run from water that raged in to engulf the seaside market he was visiting that day.
Kumuduni Kulasekera, a master's student in the same department, learned that her sister's house in Matara on the south coast had been washed away. The family had been on holiday in the central part of the country and returned to find a coconut tree fallen across what was left of the house.
Kulasekera expects she'll be involved in long-term reconstruction in the country when she returns with her husband to Sri Lanka in two years. She's completing her degree on leave from her job in Colombo, where she's research manager for an investment board that promotes foreign investment in her country.
“I was crying,” she says, recalling the initial news of the disaster and then her panicked attempts to reach her family in Sri Lanka and elsewhere abroad. “I thought the whole Sri Lanka was gone.”
Sesheeni Joud Selvaratnam grew up in Sri Lanka and studied girls' education on tea plantations at Guelph for her master's in anthropology and international development; she graduated in 2001. But she was preparing last week to head for Indonesia with her husband; both work for Action Contre la Faim/Action Against Hunger, a non-governmental organization based in Paris.
They were going to Aceh at the northern end of Sumatra, near the epicenter of the earthquake. There, she will work as a food security officer, probably helping a team distribute food to tsunami victims.
“We don't know what to expect and know that we will face very difficult and trying times in Aceh,” she says.
When Naresh Thevathasan learned early on Dec. 26 that his former Sri Lankan hometown had been engulfed by an earthquake-driven wall of water, the research associate in the Department of Environmental Biology wasted little time. By Jan. 7, he and his family had raised about $6,000 from family and friends, including $2,700 sent Dec. 27, to pay for food and shelter for the east coast town of Batticaloa. He hopes to raise a total of $13,000, to be sent to the Lions Club there to build temporary shelters for people left homeless by the waves.
“The magnitude of the devastation is humungous,” says Thevathasan, who has worked with environmental biology professor Andrew Gordon on agro-ecosystem projects for some of the world's poorest people in countries such as Ghana and Nepal. At the same time, he says, raising money intended to build shelters in Batticaloa is “achievable. It's small in scale.”
