Preparing for our trip South
Yesterday was a whirlwind meeting tour starting with the World Conservation Union, The National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka, and with an old friend who just now happens to be a National Director for OXFAM. Meetings were setup to make contacts & identify projects in tsunami affected areas before we head South from Colombo.
Each organization had expertise in specific areas and all were very helpful in providing us information. As examples of what they do, The World Conservation Union assesses the environmental & wildlife impact of the tsunami, The National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka is working directly with small to medium sized businesses providing fishing nets, sewing machines, building materials, etc., while Oxfam is working on long term quality reconstruction of housing.
The larger size of these organizations generally means more ties to the government and even more bureaucratic hoops to jump through. But even the best intentioned organizations can easily get buried in red tape.
Today we met with NKAR Travel and Tours, a private travel company, spearheading the effort ‘Back to Life’ to build new houses for 25 families displaced by the tsunami. A British individual who frequents the island and another organization in the UK, Land & Friends for Conservation, purchased the land required while over 50 individuals & businesses located here and in a handfull of countries donated the money needed to build the houses.
As an example of the government’s rules at work since the Tsunami, no one is allowed to build within 100 meters of the shoreline along the South and East coast. This puts people dependent on the ocean at a great disadvantage, especially fishing villages. It also means close to 400,000 people have been displaced from the land they once lived on and are holed up in temporary housing, camps, and tents awaiting relocation. For an organization such as Back to Life, it took over 7 months to get through the government’s approval process to purchase land near the original village destroyed by the Tsunami and get construction under way.
We are heading South in the morning…more to come.
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