Unlike almost any other request aid for a good cause, I have no need to tell anyone what the overwhelming need is nor to introduce you to a part of the world with which you aren’t acquainted nor to make personal this disaster. We all know what the need is and all have heard so many personal stories of need that we are all overwhelmed.
So instead I am going to share my quandary, which is mine more than yours, and to invite you and me to use the intensity of this disaster to discover possibilities of connection that we haven’t had to face before and to join with others in doing something about this in a long-term way.
This is my quandary. Two weeks ago I returned from a term, nine weeks, in India and Sri Lanka with the Warren Wilson Worldwide learning abroad program. I was in India and Sri Lanka with eleven students and my daughter Susie, who was coleader of the group. None of us are in danger. Nine of us returned before Christmas and the other four are still in north India.
Five weeks ago we spent two nights and parts of three days in Una Watuna, a fishing village, two miles from Galle where you have seen horrific videos on TV of buses loaded with people swirling in the water and capsizing. It was at the end of three weeks of being introduced to the Sarvodaya Shramadana Society, a Gandhian Buddhist village development program in Sri Lanka who immersed us in a rural encounters which gave us home stays, showed us many of the programs through which Sarvodaya is helping villagers to help themselves and showed us Sri Lanka. In Una Watuna we were tourists, relaxing after 3 weeks of intense exposure to Sarvodaya families and programs. This was the 8th time that our Warren Wilson groups had vacationed at Una Watuna after spending three weeks or more with Sarvodaya.
So Susie and I know Una Watuna well and it is very fresh in all of our minds. And now almost all of the restaurants we ate in, the beach we swam at, the little guest houses on the beach that we stayed in have been smashed by the sea. And most of the people we connected with are homeless with many injured or dead. We are overwhelmed and feel helpless.
But even before this disaster I was overwhelmed. After nine weeks of living simply out of a backpack, sleeping on hard beds and taking cold baths I was suddenly in my now luxurious house, with complete quiet, hot showers, a huge comfortable Honda Civic, empty highways, easy shopping, a full refrigerator and comfort, comfort, comfort during the time of the outpouring of Christmas gifts.
During our time in India and Sri Lanka we had home stays and got to know three very good village development programs following Gandhian principles. MGVS is a Presbyterian supported program for villages in the lower Himalayas of India, Sarvodaya Kendra in Gujuarat is a Hindu based Gandhian program in Gujuarat and the Sarvodaya Village Development Program is a Buddhist inspired program in 6000 villages with thousands of full time workers on very low salaries with thousands of volunteers in Sri Lanka. All are helping villagers to have decent housing, clean drinking water, toilets and productive work. And because they are all rural programs they allowed us to be immersed in rural life and to get to know and care for the families that we stayed with in home stays. We felt in all three cases that we were friends. We laughed with villagers, worked with villagers, photographed villagers, grew to really like individual villagers. It was a very personal connection. Every student also contributed $150 to each of these programs.
So this is my quandary, our quandary, which has always been there but which I now feel with new intensity. We really do know, as you all know, the tremendous gap between the comfortable American way of life with multiple opportunities and the simple, minimal, but often joyous way of life of villagers in three places in South Asia. They have honored us with garlands, smiled at us, given us great hospitality and cared for us.
And now enormous numbers of South Indians and Sri Lankans have lost loved ones and everything else without a safety net and very much need our help. And it seems to me that this is our chance to change our ways and to use this connection, felt personally through TV or in person, to do something specific and significant about this quandary.
For short term aid we can give to any of the organizations being listed everywhere. But for the long term and to really face this gap between my comfort, our comfort, and this crisiis I have to do something more.
The Sarvodaya Village Development program does not believe in doing things for villagers. Sarvodaya means awakening. What Sarvodaya does is to help villagers awaken to their own opportunities and to help them organize themselves in Shramadana, gift of labor, self help societies in village after village through mothers groups, pre schools, micro banks, farmers groups so that they can support and help each other. But they need capital, and our capitalist society is successful at amassing and holding on to capital. Sarvodaya wants us to share our capital with Sri Lankan villagers so that they can use this capital to help themselves. Sarvodaya doesn’t want our pity or our advice or for us to do something for them. They want to work as partners with villagers themselves transforming their lives.
A little capital, a little money, goes a long way in Sri Lanka and India. Maybe the jolt that this disaster gives us will free us to share in a new way. I asked Winsor De Silva, who has guided us through Sri Lanka ten times, to look for a project that we can connect to and work steadily on over the years and he has suggested Akurala-Kahawa, one of the hardest hit towns on the southern coast and only a mile from the place where a train was washed into a marsh and 1000 people died. Winsor says that the most pressing need is for support for children orphaned by the tsunami. Send a check to College Relations, Box 6376, PO Box 9000, Asheville, NC 28815-9000 made out to Warren Wilson College Tsunami Relief but with Sarvodaya on the memo line. This money will be collected and sent to support the maintenance of those orphaned in Akurala-Kahawa which will probably be a long term project. All of the money, every cent, will go to relief aid of the kind that lets the affected villagers do something for themselves rather than having it be done for them. It is personal aid, person to person, and can relieve the personal hurt from personal stories that each of us feels so strongly.
You can look at the slide shows of our visits to Sri Lanka and India on this site, billybaba.com, my boyhood name when my parents were Presbyterian missionaries in India, which has smaller slide shows which are pretty accessible on most browsers. You will need to make the effort to download the latest free Quicktime player to look at the slide shows and need to connect your speakers. The slide shows work better with a broadband connection. You can also connect to my basic site with larger, clearer slides if your computer can handle them. Click on the link to Sarvodaya's Tusnami relief page on the previous page (for which you don’t need broadband) to see the kind of work Sarvodaya is doing. Call me if you need a tax deduction and we'll find a way to send the money to Sarvodaya directly. If you want to know more please call me at 828-298-6197. Thank you for making the effort to read this and for your support.
SARVODAYA SHRAMADANA SOCIETY
Bill Mosher