Lankan cited for services to disaster survivors

For some time he entertained the thought that he might have been a victim of a hoax.

When 33-year-old Ananda Galappatti received a phone call in July and was told that he won the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, he couldn't believe what he heard.

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) chose Galappatti for "his spirited personal commitment to bring appropriate and effective psychosocial services to survivors of war and natural disasters in Sri Lanka."

The award category "recognises an individual, 40 years of age or younger, for outstanding work on issues of social change in his or her community, but whose leadership may not yet be broadly recognised outside of this community."

"I was told to keep it a secret until the official announcement," he laughs. That meant keeping it to himself for several weeks. After a week, when the official written announcement about the award had not yet arrived, Galappatti began to wonder if it was true.

But the other person on the phone, RMAF President Carmencita Abella, seemed to know a lot about him and the work he has done, Galappatti recalls, and that put some of his doubts to rest. One is not always prepared for great news. Not when one had been in the midst of so much bad news.

Preparedness is perhaps one of the things there is never enough of when a big natural disaster strikes. Galappatti knows this too well.

In the aftermath, human intervention is often hurried and improvised, even disorganised. There is a rush to provide material aid and comfort with supplies of food, water, shelter, clothing and medicines.

But what about the non-material needs? How to ease the grief, the shock, the loss? How to rebuild not just one's home but one's confidence as well, and find the courage to move on? As the saying goes, bread alone is not enough.

In 2004, Sri Lanka bore the brunt of the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands and devastated large areas of Asia from Indonesia, to Thailand, to the Maldives.

One of the worst hit was Batticaloa.

Galappatti, a psychologist by training, went to Batticaloa to coordinate the psychosocial aspects of the relief and rehabilitation work. He was one of the founders of The Mangrove, a network of organisations and individuals in Batticaloa dedicated to this type of effort.

Samarasinghe and Galappatti formed the War Trauma and Psychosocial Support Program (PSP). The latter, only 24 years at that time, embarked on a capacity-building program that involved training 20 psychosocial workers to serve the towns, villages, hospitals and refugee camps of Vavuniya. Practitioners in the psychosocial field underwent training in new crisis intervention methods aided by resources such as databases and manuals. Galappatti adapted Western psychology to Sri Lankan culture.

Philippine Daily Inquirer