SRI LANKA: With newly donated homes on Sri Lanka's tsunami-battered south coast, residents are focusing on starting a new life

She still shudders while recalling how she fled her old home as giant waves razed her village in December 2004, killing 125 people, forcing her to run to seek refuge in the nearest Buddhist temple a few hundred metres (yards) uphill. Girli Mangalika's hamlet, 60 miles (95 km) south of Colombo, has since been relocated slightly inland, and residents once consumed by the apocalyptic disaster are looking to the future. "Life was always difficult, but before the tsunami we made a decent living from coral mining. We lost everything in the tsunami. We are not unhappy now. We got this house and we try to be happy," the 48-year-old former coral miner said, surveying the lush lawn in front of her new house built by a local aid group, a far cry from the humble shelter she lived in before the disaster. Her son is now self-employed as a diver, catching ornamental fish and she has applied applied for a loan and is looking forward to starting a cloth bag-making business with a few women in her village. The newly-constructed village, paid for by a flush of international grants and donations, includes a library, community center and maternity clinic. The Sri Lantern government says that 98 percent of the tsunami reconstruction in the country's south is complete, amounting to nearly 25,000 houses. However the hardest hit east coast, where two-thirds of those affected lived, is lagging. The empty shells of destroyed buildings still litter much of the island's affected coastline, and have yet to be cleared. Aid agencies flocked to the south coast because it was more easily accessible, and the site where 1,270 people died when their passenger train was swept off its tracks by giant tsunami waves. The government has accused many aid groups of failing to honour commitments and using donor money to buy 4x4 SUVs. The newly-refurbished Seenigama Central School is a telling example of how the tsunami sucked in around $3 billion in pledged aid for Sri Lanka and paved the way for a fresh start on infrastructure long-neglected by successive governments focused on fighting the Tamil Tigers. The school buildings that were badly damaged by the ocean, have been upgraded, given a fresh coat of paint, and new wings have been built. "I think the wave of compassion that followed was far more over powering than the waves of destruction. As a result we have been able to introduced much better facilities tom the villages that we manage and enrich their quality of life. In fact some of the children call this the golden wave, because the facilities they have got after two years ,where ever the funding was utilize in the proper dIrection, I think has been a phenomenal effort " says Kushil Gunasekera, who spearheaded the Seenigama rehabilitation project. The government says 75 percent of 150,000 people whose livelihoods were disrupted by the tsunami are back to work, often at new jobs. But not all are happy with the change. Before the tsunami hit, hundreds of residents on the south coast worked as coral miners, illegally harvesting the sea for material traditionally used to build houses in the area. Analysts say the systematic erosion of the coral reefs exposed the coast to the full fury of the tsunami, which killed 35,000 people along Sri Lanka's shores and around 230,000 overall. To give residents an alternative, legal way to make a living, a factory has been set up, where brush handles are carved out of wood blocks and coconut husks are spun into coil rope. But there have been mixed results.

ITN Source | December 24, 2006

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