By CARE staff in Sri Lanka
Their migration out of the conflict zone was a desperate experience – a dreadful but unavoidable test. Finally, they started but did not look back. They didn’t know who was lost and who fell to the ground in that nightmare, crossing deep lagoons, creeping through thorny scrubs and crawling across dry sandy plains. They were afraid of darkness, light, wind, motion, stillness.
Finally, they have reached safety, but not knowing where this final destination was. Are we ready to help them rebuild their lives? Conscience questions louder than a thunderbolt.
Every moment sounds the mystical silence of aggravating challenge. As of today, some 150,000 displaced people who managed to flee the conflict zone are now accommodated in camps in Vavuniya, Jaffna and Mannar, in northern Sri Lanka. According to the government and UNHCR, as many as 120,000 civilians have crossed over from the “no-fire zone” to government-controlled areas in the past week – many are still being screened in Omanthai, just north of Vavuniya.
There has been a huge influx of people into Vavuniya during the last couple of days, as tens of thousands of people seek safety, shelter and help. CARE, in coordination with the government, UN and other national and international agencies, is providing food and emergency supplies for those who have already reached Vavuniya, where the number of displaced people is steadily increasing.
These are people who have been trapped in the fighting zone, who spent months in dark soil bunkers or hand-dug muddy trenches, having just one meal every two days, and never escaping the fear of death.
Many of them arrived alone. In Sri Lanka, we usually count four people as a family, but this doesn’t apply anymore. Sometimes a family can be just two individuals. Two children aged four and two respectively, could be a family, since their parents are among the ones who fell to the ground during their effort to leave the conflict zone.
According to various sources, almost a third of the displaced people are children and just over two percent of them are mothers with newborns. A young lady who just left the fighting zone gave birth while she was being transported in a public bus to camps for displaced people on April 21. People have fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They are dehydrated, hungry and exhausted. First they need a reasonable shelter to rest and sleep, lifesaving food to eat, clean water to drink.
Fifteen IDP camps and another huge camp called Manic Farm consisting of three zones have drastically changed the small town of Vavuniya, some 250 kilometres north of Colombo. Extra services and infrastructure will be needed to meet at least the basic needs of the huge influx of civilians. Vavuniya hospital is spilling over with wounded and sick people. Extra medical officers are being deployed to Vavuniya hospital. New land is being cleared to be developed as temporary resettlement sites for tens of thousands of people who fled the fighting.
In addition to completing emergency shelters for 3,000 people, CARE’s work crews are helping UNHCR put up tents for nearly 30,000 displaced people outside the conflict zone. CARE plans to build emergency shelters for approximately 6,000 people in total. CARE is also building latrines for more than 4,000 people and provides hot meals and emergency supplies such as bed sheets and floor mats, mosquito nets, clothing and kitchen utensils.
But with the influx of tens of thousands of people it is critical for CARE to be able to scale up its humanitarian response. Funding is needed immediately to provide clean drinking water and sanitation facilities to people in the camps. CARE is appealing for $9 million to scale up its immediate emergency response and to assist in the long-term recovery.
The need is clear. One common aspiration is visible on all these tens of thousands of faces: the urgent desire to return to some kind of normalcy. They know they might be staying in temporary or emergency shelters for a while. But still, they hope. These are people who were working as farmers, fishermen, small-scale entrepreneurs, or wage laborers before this fateful displacement.
“Would you lend us a hand to go back to our homes?” is the question contained in the silences had between us and them. Yes, they need a home to restart their lives; but today, they are happy to have a hot meal, and a safe place to sleep.