Instant aid groups give fast relief in tsunami zone
BY BILL Tarrant
Volunteers from Christian aid group Service International haul
cement blocks. Stumbling in the tropical heat after a 40-hour flight
from St. Louis in the United States, volunteers from Service
International have been put right to work building homes for Sri
Lankan tsunami survivors. Reuters
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Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Ruth Max looked around at the
shambles the tsunami had made of her beach house on Sri Lanka's southern
coast and thought it just wasn't fair.
How could she rebuild their two-storey retirement home while ignoring
the devastation all around her.
"I've known these people for years. They're more than statistics.
They're our neighbours," Max said in a telephone interview from her home
in Amsterdam.
So she and her husband started an aid group.
It is one of many spontaneous efforts that surfaced after the
strongest earthquake in 40 years unleashed an unprecedented tsunami on
Dec. 26 that left 228,000 people dead or missing in a dozen Indian Ocean
nations.
They emailed friends, set up a Web site and raised a few thousand
dollars right away. That was enough to to put up 42 temporary shacks for
the homeless. Then friends of friends sent money. That led to more
projects. The money is still trickling in five months later.
"As long as the money comes in, our circle of projects gets larger,"
Max said.
To rebuild livelihoods, they gave 20 catamarans to fishermen and
donated 30 machines that turn coconut husks into rope, a local cottage
industry.
Working through a committee consisting of their house caretaker, the
fishing cooperative chief and local officials, they have donated
computers to schools and a loudspeaker to the police station for a basic
tsunami warning system, among other projects.
Waves of compassion
The stunning television pictures of a phenomenon few people had ever
seen, and the sheer scope of the disaster, prompted an unprecedented
outpouring of charity across the world.
A lot of it - no one knows how much - is going to micro-aid groups
who have been more quick to provide relief and rehabilitation with
small, concrete projects than governments in the region, who have been
roundly criticised for being sluggish in their response.
Young people taking a year off to travel around the world began
showing up in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka offering to help.
Bill Crosby, a house painter from Mill Creek, Washington, flew to
southern Thailand to search for missing friends and ended up selling the
family home and using the profits to take food by sailboat to outlying
islands inhabited by sea gypsies and illegal Burmese migrants.
Kushil Gunasekera planned on handing out scholarships to promising
primary school cricketers at his small literacy foundation in Seenigama
village on Dec. 26.
Instead, the former cricket club champion led them in fleeing the
onrushing tsunami waves that killed more than 150 in the village.
His "Unconditional Compassion" is now a tsunami NGO, rebuilding the
village and creating a cottage industry in coir for people who before
the tsunami were illegally mining coral and destroying the reef
essential to protecting against the next tsunami.
"As much as the wave has destroyed, the waves of compassion have come
through. We can make this a blessing throughout the rural community,"
Gunasekera told Reuters.
In Khao Lak, Thailand, where many of the 3,000 people killed in the
tsunami were foreign tourists, about 180 volunteers are working at a
resort-turned-NGO, the "4kali.org Foundation".
The net-based NGO was created by the parents of 15-year-old Kali
Breisch, who was killed when the tsunami swamped Khao Lak's luxury beach
hotels.
Army of youth
It provides money to aid orphans, repair schools and "help local
communities find sources of income that don't depend on tourism", said
Britny Must, of Franklin, Michigan, a world traveller who was among the
first to arrive.
An army of youth under the banner of "HiPhiPhi" (www.hiphiphi.com) is
rebuilding a small island near Phuket, Thailand that was a noted party
haven on Asia's hippie-backpacker trail.
In Indonesia, there were so many medical teams in Aceh at the start
of the disaster, a Belgian doctor posted a note in the U.N.'s media
headquarters looking for work.
Indonesia has since mainly weeded out non-professionals among the 180
NGOs operating in Aceh, which since 2003 has been closed to foreigners
because of a military campaign against rebels.
The Internet has become a key fundraising tool. Much of the estimated
$750 million to $1 billion that Americans alone have privately donated
was raised on the Internet.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, now the U.N. envoy for tsunami
relief, said the Asian tsunami is the first international crisis where
technology had helped ordinary people make a difference.
"A lot of people were concerned about sending money to big
organisations, because they didn't know how the money would be spent,"
Ruth Max said. "But with micro-aid, you know whether you're giving money
to buy boats or computers or 350 pairs of socks for schoolchildren."
Kushil at "Unconditional Compassion" said the small groups also spend
far less of the donors' money on overhead. "Ours is less than five
percent. The bigger NGOs, the U.N., they're using 20 to 40 percent of
the donations on overhead."
Traditional aid groups are sceptical. Ad hoc nonprofessional groups
make coordination more difficult in a catastrophe, create disparities
and inequities and may contribute to aid dependency in the long run,
they say.
Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser said on the group's Web
site (oxfamamerica.org) that in the first weeks after the disaster so
many groups and individuals came "there were more organisations than
there was work to be done". |