Soosaipillai Karunakaran: Working with communities affected by disaster and conflict in Jaffna, Sri Lanka

“When the tsunami struck, I was on Christmas vacation with my family in Colombo. As soon as we heard about the tsunami, we called all of our friends and family to make sure they were all right. We were lucky, as none of our close family or friends died in the disaster.

When I spoke to my colleagues in CARE’s head office they asked me to cut short my vacation and start work again. I was asked to coordinate and collect information from different affected areas of the country. I travelled a lot between Batticaloa and Ampara, which were two of the worst affected districts in Sri Lanka. I must have travelled nearly 4,000 kilometres during the two weeks after that.

In all my experience as an aid worker in Sri Lanka, I had never before seen so much destruction, death and suffering. Economically, it was a huge blow to Sri Lanka.

People in affected communities were very shocked by what had happened. They didn’t know how they could ever regain what they had lost and they realised that they could never get their loved ones back. Initially, many people in fishing communities told me that they not want to go back to the sea again. Everyone thought they would never want to live near the coast again and people stayed on high ground, even though conditions were crowded and far from ideal.

The first thing CARE did was to organise thousands of relief packets for tsunami survivors. I helped my CARE colleagues in Colombo to plan and form a strategy for the reconstruction process. Even then, we all knew that the reconstruction would take a long time and that we needed a good strategy for the years ahead.

In Jaffna, CARE has taken a leadership role in coordinating the work of different development organisations and this is a responsibility that we take very seriously. Today, we are definitely moving from the emergency phase into long-term development work.

Working firsthand with the tsunami survivors has been important for me personally. I still visit project sites quite frequently and take time to chat with people. I have seen progress for them, as well as for the wider community. People are back to fishing again. Permanent houses are being built. People are feeling more independent again and less dependent on aid. We want to get people back on their feet again so that they are more able to cope if there are future disasters.

Many people in Jaffna have been forced to flee their homes due to the conflict. CARE is making sure that these communities also receive help. What I fear most are war and political interruptions to our work. People need to realise that development depends on stability and we need to work towards achieving peace and an environment within which development can take place.

Working for CARE, I get a chance to address issues related to poverty, human rights and other problems that need attention in Sri Lanka. By the time I retire, I hope that Sri Lanka has become more developed, that the economy is strong, the political situation stable and that there is peace and security here. My dream is to have Sri Lanka play a role in assisting other countries’ development."