From the Field: Daring To Hope in Sri Lanka

Melanie Brooks is an aid worker who just returned from the internally-displaced person camps in Sri Lanka.  Though the war in the north seems to be over, the hundreds of thousands who fled the fighting are still in desperate need of assistance.

Daring to hope

I didn’t notice anything different about her, at first; 10-year-old Priyana is a beautiful, perfect little girl, and her face lit up as she smiled at me.

Then she moved her hands. Thick bands of scar tissue circle her tiny wrists; her right hand is bent at an impossible 90-degree angle from her forearm. When she wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist in a hug, her hands hung limply.

I don’t know what affects me more: her injuries, or how she was injured. She and her 24-year-old sister, Vithiya, were playing a game when they were caught in the crossfire in January. Shrapnel shredded through Priyana’s wrists and thigh, and Vithiya’s right leg.

On the run, they couldn’t make it to a hospital for nearly two weeks. By that point, it was too late to repair Priyana’s hands.

Today, her mother, Rani, is caring for two injured daughters, alone. Her husband and another daughter died in the conflict zone; her other two daughters are still missing.

As Rani tells me their story, Priyana is playing with a purple hair ribbon, holding it awkwardly with the only two fingers that work on her left hand. Despite everything, she smiles. I don’t know whether to smile back, or cry.

While the world’s attention is on the final stages of the war in the north, the country’s second humanitarian crisis plays out here in the camps, where nearly 200,000 people were evacuated from the conflict zone by the Sri Lankan government. Like Priyana, everyone is damaged in some way, but they want to move on. Many of them have been displaced several times during the 25-year conflict; everyone knows someone who is missing, or who died in the conflict.

It’s overwhelming. Most of the displaced people ended up here in the giant Manik Farm camp in Vavuniya, in this sudden city of tents and shelters cut into the jungle.

There are people everywhere, moving, sweating in the 38C heat of the midday sun. Men digging trenches for pit latrines. Women lining up to collect water. People stirring bathtub-sized pots of vegetable curry and rice over an open fire at the communal cooking area.

Earth-moving machines rumble in the background, clearing land for more tents, creating roads. The felled trees are piled off to the side, then hauled back into the camps to be used as firewood for cooking. In every direction, there are rows upon rows of tents or temporary shelters.

Nearly 120,000 people arrived here in the space of two weeks, stretching the resources of the camp and medical facilities to the limit. Aid workers and government workers were all scrambling to put up enough tents, dig enough latrines, install enough water stations, trying to keep one step ahead of the flood of war-weary people streaming into the camp.

Today, we’re still catching up; some people are living in tents with two or three families while we build more shelters to house everyone, and we are working to replace the emergency trench toilets with something more private and secure.

But across the country, there is hope, hope that maybe this time, the 25-year-old war is really going to end. Sri Lankans, from the poorest parts of the capital city to the tourist beaches in the south, are donating food, clothing and emergency supplies for the people in the camps. Ethnicity and religion have been pushed aside, and people are reacting on a human level to the plight of ‘our brothers and sisters in the north’.

But it’s a race against time. Fighting continues in the ever-shrinking conflict zone. Tens of thousands of people are still trapped. Any day, we expect they will finally escape and arrive here, to where we are all frantically clearing new land, putting up new tents, digging new latrines.

The people still trapped have been living the nightmare of war for months now. There are more girls like Priyana out there, desperate to escape, just wanting to be little girls again. I only hope we’re ready for them when they arrive.

[Displaced persons in Sri Lanka - Photo from www.asianews.it]