Despite the worldwide rush to donate money following the tsunami catastrophe six months ago, there has been no quick fix for the people in the devastated regions. Kathy Sheridan reports on how the outpouring of cash has created its own problems.
The thick file on Mary Toomey's kitchen table is the story of the children of the tsunami. Inside is a sheaf of forms, each one attached to a picture of a Sri Lankan child.
For a beautiful, solemn five-year-old, a local nun has written: "She is very frighted [ sic] and sad after her mother's death . . . in tsunami. She [ the child] was unconscious for three to four hours when they saved her from the water. Now she always clings to someone. Her father is sickly." For an earnest-looking nine-year-old boy: "He is very silent and sad-looking. His mother goes for coolie work [ labours on a building site]." For a sweetly smiling six-year-old: "He is a pleasant boy. Has no father. His mother found in dump [ tsunami debris]. She cannot remember anything." For a withdrawn-looking 13-year-old: "He has no mother. He is very silent. He wants to study. They have lost everything." For a 12-year-old: "She is a silent girl. She has no mother. She stays with her grandmother."
Six months tomorrow after the disaster, Dr Toomey's file describes a world populated by wraiths.
She points to a picture of a man, crushed by the loss of his wife and three of his children, sitting across from his only surviving son. Months on from the catastrophe, something in their respective memory banks remains shuttered; they do not know each other.
There are also the physical scars. Many children have damaged retinas. When the sea went mad, frantic mothers planted the nearest children safely on high walls, where they remained for hours, small witnesses to an unfolding horror, staring too long into the sun, watching in vain for their mothers to return.
Dr Toomey, a native Sri Lankan Tamil and world-renowned botanist living in Dublin for more than 30 years, struggles to control her emotions as she describes her recent visit to her homeland. She set up her own tightly focused charity for the long-term care and education of vulnerable and parentless children, in conjunction with the local Sisters of Charity. But she bided her time.
"I didn't rush out after the tsunami, because I'm useless," she says. "I stayed back and thought it through."
In doing that, she was one of the rare ones. Perhaps what most distinguished the reaction to this disaster were the countless decent individuals worldwide, goaded by shocking 24-hour visuals, who established their own instant charities, decided to travel to the disaster zone themselves and took instant, momentous decisions on how that money should be spent.
Every experienced aid worker has stories of well-meaning people arriving in Sri Lankan villages within a few weeks of the disaster, armed with suitcases full of dollars and the same words on their lips: "I'm going to buy a fishing boat."
They did just that. They bought dugouts (basically little canoes with outriggers for shoreline fishing) in such numbers that the pre-tsunami stock of 5,000 dugouts has soared to 13,000. Local boatbuilders are booked up for the next three years, according to Anne O'Mahony, of Concern.
So a good day's work then? Not necessarily. The Sri Lankan government had been trying to rationalise the fishing industry for years. In-shore stocks have been decimated due to over-fishing, and catch wastage can be as high as 25 per cent. It was always a marginalised industry, with nothing like a decent living in it for the huge numbers involved.
A major plank of government strategy had been to reduce the number of dugouts. But within a few months of the tsunami, not only has government policy been turned on its head but small boats, fish and the industry itself have been significantly devalued.
While some have reservations about the government's strategy, the point is that these are serious issues with long-term implications. The problem with quick fixes is that they can cause harm.
One experienced aid worker recalls that while his team was sweating to repair damaged boats, trucks full of foreigners would arrive in town carrying several new boats and stop people on the street, asking if they wanted one.
"Who's going to say no to a boat?" he says. "Carpenters were getting boats. Some men wound up with two boats, the one we repaired and the new one handed over by passers-by. Meanwhile, the donors had nice pictures of boats being handed over to show to the people back home."
The boats were only one aspect of the avalanche of generosity that swamped Sri Lanka. While some aid workers worked to restore water supplies, clean out stinking buildings and recover bodies, others laboured to set up small industries designed to restore pride, motivation and an income to a traumatised community, only to turn around and find more of the well-meaning benefactors doling out large gifts of cash, after minimal inquiries.
"Some of our projects were inundated by passers-by 'dropping in' to help, so much so that we set up a visitors' book," says Anne O'Mahony, a 20-year veteran of the world's poorest regions. "It was what they wrote in the 'comment' section that used to make us laugh. We were there trying to get people to talk about housing, land and livelihoods, and you'd look at the comments and read something like 'we're from the something support group of Canada and we've come to give chocolates to the children'."
Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, a remote, war-torn area almost unknown to the outside world before December 26th last, and with just two foreign residents, was suddenly overwhelmed with 5,000 foreign aid workers.
"I detected some agencies - from the US and UK - who seemed to be almost in a hurry looking for projects," says Chris Flood, the Irish Government's special envoy to the affected areas.
The race to build houses saw government policy again turned on its head, as buildings were rushed up at "inappropriate speed", in Flood's words, and sited too close to the shoreline. Meanwhile, local wage rates soared due to inter-agency competition and the price of materials rocketed, leading to serious inflation and the illegal destruction of forests.
"Charities were appearing out of nowhere, particularly in Indonesia, and getting in each other's way," says Tom Arnold, of Concern. "A lot were amateurish and a lot had disappeared by March. In certain camps, you'd almost see a different charity logo on each tent. Or you'd see one lot putting in a water-supply system one week and another crowd replacing it with another the next. In the short term, they were getting in the way of people who knew what they were about."
An inevitable upshot of the early uncontrolled largesse, particularly in Sri Lanka, is the tensions now evident between those who have benefited and those who have not - or who have maybe got less.
"For example, who exactly is a victim of the tsunami?" asks Justin Kilcullen, of Trócaire. "What about the fishmonger who lived 150 miles inland and whose business went wallop because there was no fish? Aid agencies can blunder in and cause all kinds of problems."
Communities who for generations had laboured together and shared what little they had, have been split apart by jealousy. Within a few weeks of the disaster, word was trickling down of the billions being pledged by wealthier countries, word suddenly made flesh by caring foreign visitors turning up laden with dollars and promises.
These visitors talked of boats. The politicians talked (and still talk) of land and houses. Always there is the undercurrent of cash.
Who gets what, how much and how soon? Why does he have a house and I have none? Why is his new house built of better timber? Why does he have two boats while I have none? Why does that neighbour suddenly seem awash with cash? But it is the pace of the housing programme and the poor quality of many temporary shelters, with their corrugated-iron roofs - described as microwaves by locals - that is causing most frustration among aid agencies and the tens of thousands in desperate need of decent shelter in the monsoons. An estimated 500,000 survivors in Sri Lanka are still awaiting permanent housing.
"Bureaucracy, bureaucracy and more bureaucracy," says one worker.
Aid agencies must comply with local government recommendations on budget, size and materials (factoring in a severe timber shortage) used in temporary shelters, which explains the corrugated-iron roofs. But land for permanent housing is the burning issue. This is hugely exacerbated by a government ban on building within a certain distance of the beach, effectively barring tens of thousands from returning to the sites of the only homes they have known for generations, close to their boats and livelihoods.
"The transitional houses are mostly on land owned by monasteries and mosques, and they will want their land back," says Concern's Anne O'Mahony. "And people want permanent homes now, they want to put down roots again and get on with their lives. But it's still unclear whether the buffer zone is 100 or 200 metres. That seems to depend on who you talk to."
Many observers can sympathise with a government used to building just 5,000 houses a year suddenly faced with the challenge of building tens of thousands - with huge implications for logistics, trucks, skills and materials - but the frustration is massively intensified by a complete dearth of official information.
More than 80 per cent of Sri Lankan land is government-owned and many of the former beach-dwellers are in difficult legal territory. Some lost their deeds in the deluge; others never had any.
In the meantime, agencies with a mandate to build houses have no land on which to build. One angry aid worker describes having to approach existing homeowners to ask if they would allow temporary shelters in corners of their gardens.
"People were in canvas tents, we had to get people in out of the rain . . . The government promised houses but expects the NGOs to build them," the aid worker says. "So we're getting the blame for something over which we have no control. Not one cent of aid money should be handed over to the Sri Lankan government until they rescind that ban."
The temper is not improved by reports that some buffer land - in other words, the beaches - on the east coast is falling to big local hotel chains, in a government-approved push to develop the tourist industry. All of which leads some NGOs to suspect that they are being used to facilitate a "land grab" by the government.
In Banda Aceh, most of the population never even knew what a title deed was before the tsunami. And since the catastrophe, the shifting ocean plates have displaced whole sections of land, meaning that many who made a living from the sea are now looking at a new coastline, at land gained by people yet to be decided, and at land lost for ever.
In such circumstances, and with millions to spend, agencies do what they can, building and refurbishing schools and hospitals and concentrating on small infrastructural projects.
"Getting aid to the people who deserve it is one of the hardest things in the world to do," says John O'Shea, of Goal. "You have to be sure about who you're giving it to and it has to be a coherent thing".
David Andrews, chairman of the Irish Red Cross, found it even more challenging while in eastern Sri Lanka last week (where there is sporadic Tamil Tiger activity) when a couple of hand grenades went off beside him and his party. In other words, spending donor money responsibly and efficiently is not as simple as it seems.
It is in this context that one senior Irish agency figure describes the tsunami millions as "a millstone around the neck of aid agencies . . . a distraction from Darfur, Congo, Sierra Leone".
In Sri Lanka, by contrast, with its relatively sophisticated, literate, reasonably well-fed population, the influx of foreign money saw the currency soaring by 10 per cent at one point, while the country's central bank is now forecasting a balance of payments surplus for 2005, following a 2004 deficit of €170 million.
Last month, the government announced details of a €580 million scheme to upgrade its ports, build a new harbour in the devastated town of Hambantota and add a second runway at the international airport.
"The Sri Lankan government is concentrating on the big infrastructural projects. They're not running around picking up the pieces, they've farmed that out to us," says John O'Shea. "But they're already charging VAT and talking about a 0.9 per cent tax on what we bring in because they're now calling it development aid as opposed to relief aid. Surely any agency that shows such concern and goodwill for their people should be given every assistance?"
Tax reimbursement is promised to organisations that are registered, although, according to some, this is a difficult, drawn-out process.
The Government's special envoy, Chris Flood (who also visited the Tamil north during his visits, causing raised eyebrows in Colombo), refers in his report to Cabinet to "a strong and persistent perception that the [ Sri Lankan] government is politically manipulating the response [ to the tsunami] through the support of vested interests and patronage of elites". There is also the view that "it is increasingly driven centrally". Whether these are merely perceptions or reality is a moot point.
Nonetheless, six months on and many people, including the Irish, can look back with pride at their swift and extraordinarily generous response to a disaster happening a world away.
For example, the Irish Government's disbursements from the €20 million pledged include funding for projects such as the care and protection of children separated from their families, an Aids care programme, and the Disaster Victim Identification Centre in Thailand. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, visited the area shortly after the disaster and, as well as appointing a special envoy to monitor spending and co-operation, appointed a technical advisory team which has made repeated visits.
The question still asked, of course, is why a disaster in south-east Asia took such a hold of western hearts and triggered such an outpouring of cash and emotion and pressure on governments to respond.
Why did it capture more media attention in the first six weeks after it struck than - according to a Reuters analysis - the world's top 10 "forgotten" emergencies did over an entire year? Some charities took the unprecedented step of asking people to stop sending money for tsunami-affected areas.
The international medical charity, Médecins Sans Frontières, announced that it needed €25 million. It got €105 million. It has since been trying to track down thousands of donors to ask if the surplus can be redirected to non-tsunami projects in other regions, a route that several aid workers - who note that tsunami money is still coming in - say they would like to take with some Irish donations. In the meantime, the torrents of money flowing into new and unaccountable "tsunami" charities have raised again the scandalous lack of regulation of Irish charities.
As the law stands, anybody can set up a charity and registration is only voluntary. The last time this sector (estimated to have spent €10 billion in 2003, or 8 per cent of GDP) saw new legislation was 40 years ago. Now the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs concedes that the deadline for the Draft Charities Regulation Bill - promised a year ago for the end of 2005 - will probably not be met. The indications are now that it will be next spring.
Meanwhile, Africa suffers the equivalent of a tsunami every fortnight, says Concern's Tom Arnold. Goal's John O'Shea points to the 400,000 women and children "butchered" in Darfur in the last 18 months and the five million who have died in the Congo.
Trócaire's Justin Kilcullen has just returned from El Salvador, where he witnessed shocking scenes of suffering. "In Trócaire, we try to focus on long-term development and justice . . . It's very hard to get the money for long-term work," he says.
The tsunami disaster trumped them all for three reasons, says O'Shea: wall-to-wall television coverage as it unfolded; victims who happened to be white ("that's not a criticism, it's a fact of life that we relate to people who 'could have been me'"); and an apparently quick and simple solution.
Africa, by contrast, is expensive, complex and sometimes dangerous to cover for the media, with few threads of hope to help audiences to empathise, and no clear end in sight.
For all that, Concern's Tom Arnold believes that the generosity sparked by the tsunami has not been at the expense of other disaster areas. "I think in fact," he adds "that the hoopla about Live8 was almost teed up by people's reaction to the tsunami."
Concern
Raised: €19 million
Allocated to date: just under €8 million, evenly split between Sri Lanka and Indonesia
Concern works with local partners and has moved on from initial relief phase. It hopes to have 6,000 temporary wooden houses in place in Sri Lanka by the end of the summer, 15,000 uniforms and other school supplies in Indonesia. Housing and livelihood programmes are future priority.
Trócaire
Raised: €27.5 million (including 19 million from church collections)
Allocated to date: €6 million committed
Has funded Caritas organisations in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand and has opened an Indonesian office to support and monitor the work. Has moved to long-term projects such as securing jobs, housing, school reconstruction, education and healthcare. Is also working on disaster risk reduction.
Goal
Raised: €14.06 million, plus €2.89 million from Government
Allocated to date: More than (€3.7 million)
Spent around $750,000 (€620,501) a month in the emergency phase in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Andaman Islands and Tamil Nadu. Now concentrating on long-term projects in Sri Lanka, with 70 per cent of its focus on the devastated eastern area around Ampara. Goal's flagship programme is the rebuilding of 64 schools in partnership with the education ministry.
Irish Red Cross
Raised: €30 million
Allocated to date: €11.5 million
Funding so far to Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives, of which 4.5 million is committed to Sri Lanka for projects including several hundred new houses, a new hospital to serve 90,000 people in Batticaloa area, and assistance to the Galway-based Sri Lanka Relief Project to build 67 new homes in Ampara.
Some 5 million is going to Indonesia for job programmes, training, and equipping specialised volunteer teams to enable communities to defend themselves in future disasters. Committed to funding projects in India and East Africa.
The Government
Pledged: 20 million
Allocated to date: €19.9 million
Funds divided between Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, India and Burma and disbursed through agencies such as Trócaire, Gorta, Hope Foundation, Red Cross, World Vision, Mercy Corps, UNDP, ILO and VSO. Projects funded include 500,000 towards Unesco's 10 million tsunami early-warning system, the same amount to the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Centre, 150,000 in legal aid to Sri Lankans, and around 400,000 for mental health care (estimated to affect at least 10 per cent of those who experienced trauma), as well as 2 million to Concern and 750,000 to Trócaire for reconstruction work in Indonesia.