When your life has been shattered by a natural disaster, the challenges of picking up the pieces can seem insurmountable.
In poor communities, a sense of powerlessness can follow when faced with not only the scale of devastation and a lack of capacity to respond, but the inevitable hurdles of bureaucracy and officialdom.
Such a situation confronted 50,000 people on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal following the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
Close to the epicentre of the earthquake that triggered the tidal surge, the Indian-controlled islands took the brunt of the disaster and 4,000 people lost their lives.
Journey back
The aftermath saw Tearfund, the local church and partners standing alongside the survivors, together starting the long journey back to recovery.
The islands are remote and their distance from the Indian mainland has not always been to their advantage when it comes to development.
The tsunami exposed this isolation further, with official responses being slow.
Our partner, the Emmanuel Hospital Association (EHA), recognised the need for the community to be helped to speak up for itself, to have advocates who could challenge the authorities not to neglect the needs of the islanders.
Church as community leader
EHA helped mobilise the local church to play a community leadership role and to set up self-help groups so locals could decide development priorities and what needed to be lobbied for.
In Pailoon Nallah this resulted in a new school. The old one was a three-hour walk through the jungle and when the children arrived they were confronted by a structure with a thatched roof and mud floors.
It had little to entice youngsters to attend and it became noticeable that some were dropping out.
The mobilisation of the church and community paid dividends.
Roy Alex from EHA said: `The government, moved by the community’s audacity and courage, sanctioned the upgrading of the primary school to a middle school.
`The women’s group members cleaned the school campus to make the place suitable and healthy for children. This has now become a favourable environment for the children to experience the joy of learning.’
Unity and advocacy
The unity of purpose of the villagers also impressed a local education authority official so much that he ordered the construction of toilets for the school as well.
This approach has worked elsewhere on the islands. In the fishing village of Durgapur, many people used a ship to connect to a neighbouring island.
But they and 25 other villages were left in the lurch when the shipping company decided to move the ticket office out of Durgapur to a town 20 kilometres away.
Once again, self-help groups with backing from the Shiloh Church started lobbying and their persistence paid off with a U-turn by the shipping company. In the process they established a good relationship with administrators which it is hoped will lead to further community development.
Please pray
• Please pray that the church continues to provide impetus to the community’s post-tsunami recovery work.
• Pray for the leadership of EHA to be responsive to the needs of the affected communities.
• Pray that as the rainy season approaches, people will be kept safe as they go to remote areas of the islands.