Community driven tsunami rehabilitation

Survivors answer
The Big Questions

The following pages contain a slightly-edited transcript of the ACHR-sponsored networking event on "Community-driven tsunami rehabilitation", which was held on June 20, 2006, as part of the World Urban Forum, in Vancouver, Canada.  The idea of organizing this workshop in the big Vancouver meeting was not only to bring out the people-driven tsunami rehabilitation processes that have been going on in four affected countries, but to emphasize that making communities the key actors should be an important principle in all kinds of development work which involve the poor – not only disasters.

The World Urban Forum brought together a great number of high-ranking, high-flying and highly-educated professionals, policy makers and practitioners from government, non-profit, bilateral and activist backgrounds.  For five days, they were busy sharing their views about the world's pressing problems of poverty and housing – problems they are all working on, in their various ways.  But too often, the group which plays the most vital and primary role in working out lasting solutions to these problems – the poor themselves - are absent from these discussions.  The absence of this most central voice in the change-making process continues to skew the quality of our understanding and undermine the sustainability of planning and policy making.    

 

Question 1
What problems are you facing after the tsunami?

Question 2
What problems have you been facing around the roles of government in the tsunami relief and rehabilitation process?

Question 3
What about problems of land ?

Question 4
How are communities dealing with all these problems, in order to transform these difficult situations and rebuild their lives, settlements and livelihoods ?

Question 5
How are affected communities dealing with the difficult issue of land ?

Question 6
What opportunities has the tsunami created in the affected communities, what have we learned, and what doe we want to tell other communities which face similar disasters ?

 

"We now know that each of us has a potential that we didn't realize before.  It is the tsunami that gave us the opportunity to know that we had this potential."

Fitriya, whose Acehnese village was erased by the tsunami.

 

"The main lesson we have learned through the tsunami is that people should never be prevented from being the owners of their own lives.  They should decide what they need and what they should do, even when they are in a very bad shape, after a crisis."
Nilanthi  (Sri Lanka)   

 

"We do the construction work ourselves ....... Nobody is idle.  And that is also a very good way to overcome trauma of the disaster we've all been through, by being very busy."
Ridwan  (Indonesia)

So this tsunami workshop was an attempt to bring the people – who are the real development workers – to present their experiences and their ideas.  Many of the people who came from their Asian coastal slums and villages to attend this meeting may not get many chances to speak their minds at such big international meetings.  But when an opportunity was created for poor tsunami survivors to speak, as here, out came ample evidence of their wisdom, their understanding, their ability and their resourcefulness.  You'll see.  As Fitriya, whose Acehnese village was erased by the tsunami, says towards the end of the seminar, "We now realize that each of us has a potential that we didn't realize before.  It is the tsunami that gave us the opportunity to know that we had this potential."

 Besides our own core team of community participants, we got a good crowd for the meeting – about 150 people eventually crammed themselves into that hot little room, to listen to some poor tsunami survivors talk about what their struggles! 

For the support given to make this workshop possible, we have very special thanks to give to good friends at Misereor, Development and Peace, Homeless International and the Selavip Foundation – and to the UN-Habitat for making space available for this workshop. 

 

Somsook (Thailand) :   Welcome everybody to this down to earth discussion.  Today we will have a discussion on community-driven rehabilitation after the Asian tsunami.  Today's meeting is going to be a little different from most of the sessions that are being organized in this World Urban Forum.  Different how?  The discussions and presentations here will be made mainly by community people from the four tsunami-affected countries - Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India.  So people who experienced the tsunami first-hand will speak out.  They will be the key actors in telling the stories, from problems to solutions.

I would like to make this a very brief introduction, but before we begin the discussion, we will show a short video which will give you the overall picture, beginning with the problems caused by the tsunami and touching some of the ways different countries are trying to cope and to rehabilitate the people affected by the tsunami, using the force of people, and the force of networks of affected people. 

I hope that you will all agree with me by the end of this meeting that this tsunami rehabilitation experience is something very significant, which sends a message of a new development agenda, in which people themselves are the key actors.   We see this very clearly throughout the tsunami rehabilitation process.  We will use the same principle in our discussion today, by trying to find a way that the people are the key actors here also, and people are the main presenters.  Then, those of us who come from the side of professional supporters can add to and support what the people will present.

Next

Question 1

What problems are you facing after the tsunami?