Three grads who did what we all wanted to do

In the aftermath of the devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia, we all wanted to help those who lost their loved ones, their homes and their livelihood. For most of us that meant making a financial contribution to the Canadian Red Cross or other relief agency, but for three Guelph graduates, it was a hands-on experience — loading emergency rations, digging organic matter out of dirty wells and battling local bureaucracies to co-ordinate an effective disaster response.

Erin Smith, Victor Menkel and Valerie Raymond were all part of the relief effort in Sri Lanka, an island country where more than 40,000 people died and devastation was widespread. Although their experiences are all different, they share a deep respect and admiration for the resilience of the Sri Lankan people.

Erin Smith: “I can’t forget them.”
When the waves of the tsunami started thrashing the shores of Sri Lanka, I was on a train in the Colombo station, ready to head south to join a few friends on our favourite beach. I disembarked to take a frantic phone call from a friend running from the beach to higher ground. The train went on without me and made it only 40 kilometres before it was hit by the waves. I had been saved from being caught in the tsunami itself, but was soon wrapped into a small faction of what was to become the greatest humanitarian aid response in history.

I had been working in Sri Lanka since August 2004 for the World Conservation Union (IUCN), on an internship with the Canadian International Development Agency and the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development. Sri Lanka was fascinating to explore, and the people of the island were incredibly kind. They were also fervent survivors, maintaining dynamic spirits throughout decades of civil conflict. These traits became even more evident in the days after the tsunami.

While the waves were still razing the coasts, Colombo moved into emergency response mode, with local aid groups recruiting volunteers like myself to co-ordinate the purchasing and shipping of dry rations. Medical teams were sent to the disaster zones to help treat the injured, often getting to survivors by jumping out of helicopters forced to hover over rubble. My friends and I, like many others, drove to the coasts to try to find survivors. Seeing those regions for the first time revealed the apocalyptic sense of the disaster. The roads were choked with stunned survivors, their pale blue houses now skeletons spilling intimate mementos of photos and clothing into muddy rubble. The beaches had become burial grounds, cradling bodies that continued to wash in for days.

Because of the extent of the damage and the number of people affected, there were great difficulties with the co-ordination of relief efforts. Land mines had shifted with the waves in the island’s political and natural landscapes, making it difficult to ensure that aid was getting to the rebel-controlled areas as well as government-run regions. A network of about 30 friends and I circumvented some of these problems by signing up as volunteers with a number of organizations and text messaging each other when people and supplies were located and needed.

During the weeks after the tsunami, we would move from rationing dry goods into family packs to assessing what supplies camps needed. Some of us worked in temporary morgues, identifying foreigners among the dead, and others fielded overseas calls from families looking for loved ones. None of us slept.

During the day, I worked with the IUCN on post-disaster environmental impact assessments. My evenings and weekends were filled with various tasks. It was normal for me to deliver food to a camp, then find myself in a field teaching the chicken dance to 30 children.

In my last few weeks in Sri Lanka, I saw the need for clothing and medicines replaced by demands for building materials and sanitation networks. The kids in the camps started drawing houses being built instead of waves in the sky. Most organizations are now focusing on long-term endeavours such as livelihoods, housing and sanitation projects. The initiatives I’m most hopeful about are the ones being carried out by smaller grassroots movements working alongside international organizations.

The world’s generous response to the victims of the tsunami was overwhelming but justified. Too often, many of us allow our desensitized selves to sit back while others are in need, and now that the initial response to the waves is over, there is concern that those affected will be left behind by the rest of the world. This sentiment was made clear to me in the plea of a woman my age now living, like hundreds of thousands across the island, in a refugee camp. “Please,” she whispered as she held my shoulder. “When you all leave, don’t forget us.” There’s no way I ever will.

Erin Smith is a researcher and writer currently based in Ontario. She received an undergraduate degree in geography from Queen’s University in 2001 and an MA from Guelph in 2004.

Victor Menkal: “The resilience of the Sri Lankans is incredible.”

Within days of the tsunami, I saw a TV interview with Toronto paramedic Rahul Singh, who was standing in front of a large pallet of bottled water being airlifted to Sri Lanka. I contacted him by e-mail and suggested a small reverse osmosis water plant would be much more cost-effective than shipping water and offered to provide technical support and a donation. I had intended to provide support from Whitehorse, but he called the next day (Dec. 30) and asked if I would be ready to leave Jan. 2. It didn’t take much thought to decide to go.

I joined a team of volunteer paramedics with Global Medics, an amazing little non-profit aid group that’s been working for a number of years in Southeast Asia and other developing countries, providing medical training, medical supplies, clinics and disaster assistance.
The Global Medics team was responsible for setting up a small clinic and dispensary at our hotel to service local needs, provided mobile medical assistance to refugee camps and small villages affected by the tsunami, and built a clinic at a refugee camp.

My work included an engineering evaluation of the municipal and private water supply system
for the town of Batticaloa (population over 100,000), developing a well-decontamination strategy, and training and advising on required emergency repairs.

Many days, I was elbow deep in dirty wells training teams of local residents and volunteers from the Texas Baptist Men’s organization on methods to clean wells contaminated with toxic organic sludge left by the tsunami. Equipment was begged, borrowed or otherwise acquired.

Rahul’s local contacts in Sri Lanka were invaluable. Krishan Thambapillai, a young local businessman, was one of the most resourceful people I’ve ever met. He organized volunteers to help clean wells, co-ordinated with his uncle in Colombo to get the specialized pumping equipment, and used other local businesses to provide supplies and equipment. After working around the clock for countless days, he still took the time to make a Canadian flag with the “Camp Yukon” logo for our base camp.

A six-year-old boy named Ajanthan became my engineering assistant. Every day, he carried my backpack and rode around with me. We gave him the nickname “Short Round” from the Indiana Jones movie.

After mobilizing the well-decontamination teams, I evaluated the municipal piped-water system. Many of the municipal wells were infected with E. coli, and pumps, pipelines and other equipment were in need of repair. I was sickened to find that both municipal well fields were also contaminated with land mines that had been scattered from two military bases by the flooding.

His contacts come through again, and a demining outfit of ex-military engineers from the Indian army came to help so we could inspect and clean municipal wells. We called these brave men the Sri Lankan National Tap Dance Team.

We developed a plan of action to undertake emergency repairs required to keep safe water flowing to the town, hospital, schools and refugee camps, and set up a basic water lab for the local engineer to use. Rahul asked me to train a couple of environmental health inspectors from the Ministry of Health in well inspection and decontamination. More than 50 people showed up for my course.

The kindness, generosity and resilience of the Sri Lankans were incredible. People greeted us warmly wherever we went and offered soft drinks even though they had lost almost everything.
I am extremely proud to have been able to work with Rahul’s Global Medics team. It was amazing to see the difference that such a small group of people can make for so many others. The experience was one of the most incredible things I have ever done.

I am currently working with the Yukon government, Yukon College and the Rotary Club to “adopt” the town of Batticaloa and provide ongoing assistance for at least one year. In the meantime, the work of Global Medics continues in Sri Lanka. If you’d like to help, contact the organization at dmgf.org.

Victor Menkal, B.Sc.(Eng.) ’87, is a water resources engineer based in Whitehorse, Yukon. He is also a volunteer with the Canadian Ski Patrol system and has experience as an auxiliary paramedic. He is pictured here with his Sri Lankan friend Krishan.

Valerie Raymond: “We have to try to make a small difference.”

On Dec. 26, Valerie Raymond, BA ’73, Canada’s high commissioner to Sri Lanka, like many other Canadians, was enjoying a few days’ holiday. As fate would have it, she and her partner were at a resort near Galle on Sri Lanka’s southwest coast and experienced first-hand the devastating tsunami that so dramatically affected the island — and the world — that day.

They watched from their second-storey room as the sea eerily receded, then surged to shore. But it wasn’t until the water was calm once more and she went downstairs that Raymond began to grasp the devastation the waves had wrought — the hotel lobby gutted, shops destroyed, concrete walls flattened and cars strewn about like toys.

Sri Lanka was hard hit by the tsunami, with more than 40,000 deaths and vast stretches of coastal areas ruined. Raymond found her way back the following day to the inland capital of Colombo, and since then, her life and job have been consumed by the disaster.

Initially, consular matters took priority, with those in the High Commission spending exhausting days helping to account for Canadians in Sri Lanka, finding them accommodation, contacting their families and easing their way home. She and her staff also worked closely with officials in Ottawa on Canada’s humanitarian response to the tsunami, a key part of which was bringing the 200-member Disaster Assistance Response Team to provide medical support, clean water and other assistance to the island’s devastated Ampara district.

Raymond lauds the dedication and professionalism of staff at the Canadian mission in Sri Lanka, as well as the temporary reinforcements sent by Foreign Affairs Canada. She says she’s been inspired by the resilience of the Sri Lankan people, whom she has come to know well through Canada’s efforts in support of ending the country’s long-standing and brutal civil war.

The conflict zone in the northeast was badly hit by the waves, she says. “Many of these people had suffered for many years before the tsunami and now have to face another disaster. The devastation and the destruction are absolutely heartbreaking.”

Yet, she adds, there have been heartening stories of people from the country’s three main groups — the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims — helping each other.

Raymond will return to Ottawa when her three-year appointment to Colombo ends this summer, but life after the tsunami won’t ever be the same. “I don’t think we can try to understand these things. We simply have to try to make a small difference, and that’s very sustaining.”

Valerie Raymond was born in Winnipeg, grew up in Edmonton and began her career as a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen in the mid-1970s. She moved on to a series of communications positions in the federal government and, in 1986, joined the Department of External Affairs and International Trade, where she took on a number of senior jobs. She served as Canada’s High Commissioner to New Zealand from 1997 to 2001, and in 2002 was posted to Sri Lanka with concurrent accreditation to the Maldives.

(Raymond’s story reprinted from Canada World View.)

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U of G Response
As fas as we know, no one from the University of Guelph family was lost or injured by the tsunami in Southeast Asia, but several members of the Sri Lankan community on campus were affected both personally and professionally by the devastation. Faculty and graduate students saw family members and friends lose their homes, and development projects under way in several coastal communities were washed away with the villages.

Through these students and faculty, other members of the University have been able to channel donations directly into affected communities and established agencies like the Sri Lanka Centre for Development Facilitation (SLCDF), a non-governmental organization headed by rural studies graduate Wijewickrama Abeydeera, XXX ’02. SLCDF serves as the hub of a network of 3,300 community groups and almost 300 non-governmental organizations across Sri Lanka.

The University provided personal counselling for students and employees who desired it and reviewed ways that U of G research expertise could support relief efforts. Various groups held memorial services on campus and in the Guelph community and conducted fundraising events.

Looking to future prevention of similar disasters, U of G engineering professor Bill James is working with other members of the hydrotechnical division of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering to design a new curriculum module on water waves that will be made available to educators. He hopes it will help future engineers design structures and procedures that could ultimately save lives and coastal property and environments.

Land resource science professor Michael Brookfield’s research could help predict areas at risk for future tsunamis. Because recent surveys show large underwater landslides in the area, he suggests waves that surged across the Indian Ocean in the tsunami may have been generated partly by landslides caused by the earthquake as well as by the earthquake movement itself. Brookfield’s research includes the comparison of historical records and geological evidence of giant tsunamis, and he says landslides tend to generate larger waves than quake-generated waves. He also notes that such events happen more frequently than many people realize — perhaps every century or so
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