When the sea was boiling hot.
Dated: 18/Jan/2005
"The time has come", the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things.
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax
And cabbages and kings.
Of why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings"
- Lewis Carroll
The Walrus and the Carpenter
We can talk to a small child of many things. The debate on whether pigs have wings might bring much mirth to its little heart. Games and competitions keep it busy, smiling and energetic for a few hours... but when the Sun sets, when the darkness approaches, to the hearts of the children of Chinnangudi village, and many other villages on the Coramandal coast, there comes a fear.
A fear, which they are now, 3 weeks since, after counseling by physicians, psychologists, monks and others, only beginning to get over. It is the fear of the sea boiling hot. It is the daunting question of why it boiled hot on that fateful boxing day in 2004 and why, after some idiot astrologer went on TV and announced it would come again on the 26th of January, others try to assure them that it won't. (Ok, I didn't really hear the astrologer myself, but some villagers told me they did, in the small TV in the tea-shop)
AID India
After the experience of two weekends, we had decided that just going to an NGO and saying that we want to help and doing piecemeal work for 10 villages in 2 days isn't really worth it. We needed to be able to take up a set of substantial activities in one village and follow them up to conclusion. Fortunately, AID India operates with a well regulated process.
So two of us set off on Wednesday night and reached Thirukkadayur on Thursday morning. It turned out that one AID volunteer, after spending 7 days getting a wonderful rapport set up in one village, Chinnangudi, was leaving that very evening. So we went to this place with him, there was a survey going on from AID (the voluntary organisation we have been associated with these 3 weeks) and we joined it. We found that there were plenty of things to be done.
Misconception
There is a general rumour going around that there is no more need for volunteers. As long as people just land up there and do odd-jobs, it is very easy to think this is the case. The necessity is for people to go there with a group consisting of Tamil speakers, get information about villages from AID etc., walk around and look themselves, find their own work to do, plan it and see it through to a decent level of completion.
If you take a close enough look, there is a lot of work to do.
The situation in Chinnangudi
We surveyed 44 houses that first morning and I heard 44 different stories. I surveyed 10 houses the next day and it was even worse.
I'll never forget how the man with five girl children, who had lost his wife to the waves, ran inside to get her photograph on her voter's id card, to show to us how beautiful she had been! I'll never forget how the man who was borne more than 2km by the waves, thrown on a tree of brambles and spent a week in hospital, could barely speak, for his emotion was choking him.
These guys go fishing at around 3 in the morning. At about 5:30 they are deep inside the sea. At pre-dawn, around 5:45, the sea becomes silvery, the fish are attracted by the colour and the glare is too much for them to spot the cords of the net. This is when most of them get caught.
On the morning of the 26th, the fishermen reached back the shore between 8 and 8:30, removed their motors from the catamarans and laid them out to dry in the Sun, and were sorting out their catch on the beach, when suddenly they looked up to see a wall of water which swept everything in its path before they could even think!
A few of these people don't own boats. They fish using others' and get a commission on the catch and/or salary for helping to vend the fish. A very few of them owned fully-equipped fiber-glass boats. However, most of them had catamarans. We found the boats, some of them broken, in all parts of the village: one was stuck between huge bramble trees. We found catamarans well over two kilometers from the shore, beyond the village!
Need of the hour
Rescue was done and dusted ages ago. Relief is going on rather well, with both the government and private organisations making sure that the entire village of 541 families get enough food. They have been given clothes and they seem to have enough of them. Temporary shelters came up within 3 days in front of our eyes, such is the speed of government contractors. The allegedly temporary shelters are better than the original huts some of the villagers used to stay in!
All the 40 families have received the compensation for their deceased. Everyone, just everyone in every village has been inoculated and all of them have been educated about drinking boiled water etc. Most of them are following the instructions to the letter. They also get a liter of milk per family every other day.
The need for the hour is neither clothes nor food. The operative word is rehabilitation. The perpetual questions on every villager's lips is "How long will this go on? How many days will we sit around and eat relief material? How soon can we get back to the sea where our livelihood is?".
They need boats/catamarans, nets, diesel-motors. That's expensive stuff. The collector openly agrees that the compensation won't be near enough.
"seekarama enga pozappukku edhaavadhu vazi paNNa sollunga", lots of them told me this. (please tell them to do something about our livelihood soon)
I heard a lot of "collector ayya kitta solli marathukku valaikkum Erpaadu paNNa sollunga". (Please tell the collector-sir to arrange catamarans) Lot of them really believe this man is their deliverer.
"eththana naaL ippadiyE kadalukku pOgaama irukkaradhu? naalu padicha puLLainga vandhu kELvi kEtaangaLE, avanga kitta solli gavarment kitta manu kudukka sollEn", said an old lady with thick glasses to her daughter, within ear-shot of me. (How long can we not go into the sea? Some educated kids had come and asked questions in the morning. Ask them to submit petitions for us to the government)
These are the questions that AID India is trying to answer, not only in the 9 villages it has taken up in and around Thirukkadayur, but also in various other parts of the state. These are the questions some other NGOs are trying to answer too. There are other NGOs, really amazingly rich ones who just bring material and distribute them. These too are needed to do exactly that until the rehab is complete.
Planning for tasks
Our predecessor, had been trying unsuccessfully for days, because of some logistics issues, to conduct some games for children.
The children sat around all night and wouldn't sleep a wink for fear of the waves coming back.
Even though people had been treated for injuries, they were following it up neither with the local Primary Healthcare Center, nor with the various private ambulances which come to their village once in a few days.
AID volunteer, American ecologist and social-worker Terri (the brains behind most of the things we did) and his selflessly striving enthusiastic wife Jennifer (bosom buddies for 4 days and I didn't even ask them their last name!), were monitoring all the stagnated saline water to see if mosquito larvae had formed.
AID volunteer Stephen, a Frenchman, was trying to make a soak-pit toilet all alone and had been rather unsuccessful since he doesn't understand Tamil and nobody understands him.
Terri, who was trying to get the villagers to tether together loose logs to form their own catamarans, was facing the same problem.
It was a sad, grim village staring at us with hopelessness.
Fact is that the village elders and everyone else, very reasonably too, are scared that the government isn't going to compensate them for their boats, motors and nets if they try and repair the ones which are lying around. They needed someone to assure them. They wouldn't open out to anyone.
Our Tasks
We spoke to the collector, a very reasonable and unassuming man, and he came to their village and gave them this assurance. He told them that no matter whether they had managed to repair their boats or motors, they would still be compensated. This was, of course, after much pleading on our part with the villagers and also a long session by the AID coordinator, with the village-council.
I just heard from Terri 5 minutes back that he got one guy to make a catamaran, repair his motor and get the thing into the sea. That should make the others sit up and take notice.
Our guys helped Stephen (or Tintin, as other volunteers/village kids had already named him, due to his hairstyle) to not only complete his original soak-pit toilet but also to get two more done.
We got the women of the village together, who had never used a toilet before, but were willing to do so (the men, after a week, returned to the sea-shore for their morning trip), we told them how to maintian the toilets by sprinkling bleaching powder, they assured us they'd somehow get their lazy men-folk to build more toilets for them.
Under Terri's architectural guidance, we dug a neat canal behind the school building to eliminate the awful smell due to water-logging there. Another of Terri's ideas to get a trough built outside the school where the children can throw the remains of their lunch got implemented somehow at the last moment.
We got an Indian-American physician, Dr.Gurbani, who had postponed his and his son's return to the US in order to come and help, to come to Chinnangudi and look at all the people who were hurt.
A Buddhist monk, Daniel, Belgian by birth (imagine M.Hercule Poirot with a clean-shaven head and face and wearing a saffron robe and coolers), came around and had a calming meditation session with a section of the villagers who we though were the most scared still. This was really effective.
We went back to the village one night and slept on the beach, about 15 of us, so as to assure the villagers that the sea will not raise against them again.
We had all the children together for a painting competition, a colouring competition, skipping games, running races, a cricket tournament, all the kids screaming and laughing and having a wonderful time.
We got all the youth of the village to form 4 kabaddi teams and conducted a full-fledged knock-out tournament!
We got the local police inspector and the village president, a nice old lady, to give away the gifts and shields we had taken with us for the winners.
These were only the few things that we managed to do in the village we chose for this weekend.
The undercurrent of sadness will be there until time heals it. The fear of the government ditching them will be there until they get their money, and since they will surely not get enough to buy them boats and nets anyway, it will turn to disappointment. The children will still take time to recover from the nightly fear. Some lazy men would still rather sit around and play cards with the Tsunami as an excuse. Nobody would forget their deceased loved ones. Nobody would every forget in a hurry, how the wave had gone high above the electricity pole and how they had to drop everything and run...
Other Volunteers
Many people come from Mumbai, Bhuvaneshwar, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, etc. and they do a lot of work, as AID volunteers, in the 9 villages in the area.
There are Canadians, Austrailians, Britishers, Germans, people who have cut short a holiday elsewhere in India to come to volunteer, people who have extended their trip in order to volunteer, students who lead a hand-to-mouth existances but do whatever they can in physical labour... many many more stories of volunteers!
We didn't do anything great. We acheived whatever little we could. There are some people who spend 10 to 15 days in succession, take a two day break and come back! We can barely spend our weekends there. Still we did a little bit of what we could and we are hoping that Chinnangudi was that little bit happier and a little more hopeful for those 3 or 4 days of our stay.
Associates of AID
AID is associated with the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, the Pondicherry Science Forum (who have created a wonderful system of Participative Survey, which all other NGOs can usefully adopt) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India.
These DYFI guys are simply amazing! They are the localites of Thirukkadayur and surrounding areas. They have been working since day 1. They are still kids. Starting from boys in 10th standard. They tell stories of how they rescued people in their own village when the waves came. They removed nearly 120 bodies in 8 villages on the 2nd day when voluntary organisations hadn't even started thinking of their first moves!
Since their families didn't get affected, they have come to help other villages. There are two guys who have been cooking (delightfully tasty) food for all other 100 or so volunteers, everyday since the 26th of December.
Future volunteering from our group
In the last few hours before our return we found that there are still villages which haven't got all the wonderful luxuries that Chinnangudi has!! We visited a single-street hamlet of 83 families who are all landless labourers. Their lands have all been salinated and nothing would grow there anymore. The collector did assure us the ICAR is having a close look at it but nobody knows how long it would take. They're trying some experiments with cashew-growing and also there is something about gypsum soaking-up the salt. Meanwhile the dalit villagers end up not getting the milk that comes to the village. No idea how and where that gets diverted. Work on their temporary shelter is dead-slow and they are all living in tents provided by some Church in Chennai which is barely enough to hold those huge families.
(Amazingly, in nearly all the villages, each couple seems to have 4 children on an average! We found one couple who had 10 children!!)
Then there are other villages, and we can always go back to have a look at how over beloved people of Chinnangudi are going on. It does look like there is enough work for us to do in the coming weekends. We'll have to see how many people have the time this time.
Please contact Abhishek HK or Vishal Raval on the 1st floor of the main building, in case you are interested.
thanks,
Sundar.
