Two and a half years after she first visited Sri Lanka's tsunami-devastated east coast, Kathy Sheridanreturns to see whether the promised aid is making a difference.
Al Hussain is not the first new school to be opened on Sri Lanka's remote east coast. But it may well be the only one anywhere to be built on a 30-foot-deep lagoon, on foundations cobbled out of homes devastated by a tsunami.
At one side of the airy, third-floor assembly hall, tall coconut trees sway in a merciful breeze. On the other is the still lagoon, where hundreds of people drowned, mistaking it for shallow water while fleeing from the rampaging sea. Nearby is the piece of sandy beach that is now Akbar Palli cemetery, where many of them are buried.
Small sandy mounds, topped by low wooden stakes, mark their passing. Each flies a ragged piece of white cloth, the colour of sorrow. A shrub struggles to grow from some, with a flower that "closes and rests in the evening", says Rashmin, a 25-year-old local man and a worker with Goal, the Irish aid agency. "If it grows high, it means that person is in heaven."
It was a holiday on December 26th, 2004, but some children had come to the school on the beach for extra tuition. Rashmin remembers the water suddenly crashing in over his head and "so many little bodies at my feet".
No-one here in Saintamaruthu is free of nightmares. Nine children were lost in Rashmin's wider family. Mohamed Jaufar, the 33-year-old owner of the Sea Breeze restaurant, the only beach-front building left standing, remembers his father clinging to his arm, then letting go. His mother was found in the lagoon, three days later. "The pictures of crying and bodies . . . they're always in my head."
When this reporter last visited Saintamaruthu, within days of the tsunami, the cramped, narrow streets that had served as deadly funnels for the raging sea were impassable, blocked with the debris of homes and human beings, overlain with the stench of decaying bodies deep in the rubble.
Wraith-like men scrabbled with bare hands in the debris, pleading for help to uncover their dead. The wrecks of their fishing boats were embedded in trees, on roofs, in walls, hundreds of metres from the shore. The arrival of a bulldozer, hired by Goal, was so significant that there was a little ceremony in the mosque to mark the beginning of survival and to serve notice to local men that there was work to be done.
Now, on a baking, humid day two and a half years on, the debris has been tidied into piles away from the streets. Cattle wander among the foundations of what once were homes. In many cases, even the footprints of the houses are gone; only the numerous wells - solid, concrete structures - survive, monuments to life before the tsunami.
But down the densely packed little streets, signs of hope and regeneration are slowly appearing. New homes are appearing on tiny plots, some of them quite elaborate. Hundreds of small fishing boats line the beach and bob on the sleepy sea, many bearing the name of international charities. One reads "Fethard-on-Sea". Walls now enclose the beach-side cemeteries, lending shelter and dignity to the dead.
This is the "Goal Mile" in the remote Ampara district, and its fingerprint is everywhere: on the green-painted cemetery walls, on the reconstructed Beach Road bridge, on the new Fishermen's Rest room (the only new building sanctioned on the beach).
Above all, Goal has placed its stamp on the future, by sinking much of the $23 million (€17 million) raised from Irish people, into the construction or rehabilitation of 62 robust schools.
Al Hussain is one of them. Last Friday, the 500-pupil primary school hosted a three-hour opening ceremony, which saw five Sri Lanka-based Goal workers greeted by a snappy, militaristic marching band before being wreathed in garlands of jasmine ("temple flowers") and showered with petals and glittering confetti by giggling schoolgirls. A crowd of hundreds then piled in to watch a little Muslim girl boot up a computer (all the schools come with fully equipped libraries, computer and science labs) before sharing a simple repast of samosas, plantains, and sweet cake on paper plates, washed down with the ubiquitous bottles of Mirinda orange, drunk through straws.
Before the interminable speeches and musical tributes ("Beloved Goal/ You care all/ With a global goal/ You come in/ When we crawl/ of a deadly foul"), there was a two-minute silence in memory of the 56 schoolchildren here who died "in the terrible wave", the 119 injured, the 28 who were orphaned or lost at least one parent.
"Many of the children here still have counselling," said a teacher. "They have terrible dreams in the night, wet their beds, are unable to concentrate in class. Sometimes if they see a [symbol resembling a] wave on the blackboard, they become upset. We take them to the seaside and tell them stories at the shore . . . We keep on telling them the tsunami won't come again . . ."
It was a lengthy, hot, humid, but rather charming ceremony. For the Goal team in Ampara, Al Hussain school, with its airy design and peculiar challenges, is a jewel in their crown. But after two and a half years, it was for all that, number 58, ticked with no little relief off a seemingly interminable list.
Goal make no bones about why they chose to spend the bulk of the tsunami money on a schools programme. The firm plan was to get in and get out in two years, says Jonathan Edgar, a 37-year-old former management consultant, now a Goal programme director.
New schools were needed to replace those destroyed in the tsunami. Schools untouched by the sea were rendered virtually uninhabitable by the hundreds of thousands of people forced to use them for shelter.
For an aid organisation, schools would be more sustainable, more clear-cut than permanent housing, less susceptible to the notorious Sri Lankan bureaucracy and to intractable rows over land and beach buffer zones. Goal chose remote Ampara - a 10-hour car journey east of the capital, Colombo - as the area of greatest need.
But choosing the east meant they also had to reckon with its location in volatile, politically sensitive Tamil Tiger territory, and a vicious rebel army at war with a stubborn, heavy-handed government, now alleged to be hand in glove with a former rebel faction, involved in the abduction of children for use as soldiers.
IN A VICIOUS, sadistic, 25-year civil war, with more than a few parallels to the Irish Troubles, an estimated 100,000 have been killed and more than half a million displaced by the fighting. An entire society has been brutalised. The suicide rate, especially among the young, is reportedly one of the worst in Asia.
After some post-tsunami recovery, tourism has again been decimated - much of it due to foreign governments' travel warnings - on an island that should be a sun, surfing and nature lover's paradise; beautiful hotels are 70 per cent empty.
Meanwhile, in a country that once promised to be the economic beacon of the region, the flights to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and South Korea are filled with weeping young girls emigrating. Last year, over 200,000 people emigrated, half of them unskilled, half of them domestic servants. According to official figures, these represent over a million families, with more than 4 million dependants - equivalent to a fifth of the country's population. Their remittances in the first quarter of 2007 are expected to total 200 billion rupees (€1.3 billion), comprising the bulk of Sri Lanka's foreign earnings.
For now, there is little hope. A ceasefire brokered by the Norwegians, talked up with some optimism at tsunami time, is dead in everything but name.
Human Rights Watch accuses the Sri Lankan government of using anti-terrorist legislation to silence journalists who expose human rights abuses and official corruption or otherwise question the government's handling of the civil war. Newspapers have had assets frozen and ministers have lost their jobs after criticising human rights violations.
But in another familiar story, foreign observers have also turned a blind eye on Tiger atrocities (whose soldiers carry vials of arsenic in the event of capture), in the name of not rocking the peace boat.
In the meantime, the east has become a powder keg, increasingly swamped by military and police checkpoints, subject to electricity cut-outs and mobile phone jamming. More people have died in the Sri Lankan war in the past 16 months than in the entire Irish Troubles.
Some 300,000 people have been displaced by the fighting. In Batticaloa district, an hour's drive north of Ampara, a recent inter-agency report talks of "intensive daily shelling", putting at risk the civilian population and aid workers; of insufficient temporary shelters, of 30,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) without food, and of "serious pressure" being put on terrified refugees to return to dangerous home towns such as Trincomalee.
On a drive north to Batticaloa last week, through innumerable checkpoints, it was evident that the huge IDP tented encampments hadn't the capacity to cope. Sri Lankans are taking shelter in schools again, just as they did after the tsunami. Only, now they are fleeing a war. In a village on the edge of the town, the construction of a school by a European government agency has been virtually halted by the sudden arrival of 300 terrorised people. More than 100 schools are closed in the district, 17 are being used as IDP sites and others are under pressure to admit new IDP children.
It's hardly surprising that most aid organisations and media concerned with the tsunami confined themselves to the less volatile south.
In Goal's building projects, security was responsible for at least a third of their problems, says John Wain, Goal's country director. One school was on its third contractor; the previous two had fled. Ultimately, Goal withdrew 12 of the 62 schools from contractors and completed them itself, using direct labour.
THE SCHOOLS PROGRAMMEshould have been completed last November; the last of the Goal team should have left by December. The frustration is palpable. Sri Lanka has huge needs but is not the worst, says Jonathan Edgar. "It doesn't compare to others such as Niger or Darfur. But around 130 Goal ex-pats have passed through Sri Lanka in less than two and a half years."
As well as security, other obstacles have included a national mania for bureaucracy (100 government ministers for a start), hierarchy (decisions entailing 15 signatures rather than one), pride (one school principal refused to let the contractor in), false promises from contractors failing to deliver (not unique to Sri Lanka, of course), building strikes (once a fortnight on average, often related to a death in the war), heavier than usual monsoons triggering landslides and supply problems, a sand strike, a shortage of steel and cement, and inflation soaring to 20 per cent causing unrest to contractors on fixed payments, not to mention a massive outbreak of the chikungunya virus.
Even when complete, the challenge is to get the courses started. In one brand new, fully equipped vocational training centre, only half the required number of instructors is in place and, so far, there are no students at all. "Next week," smiles the man in charge. "Next week?" says Wain, in the tone of a man who's heard it all before. The head pauses: "Hopefully," he says, with a beatific smile.
It probably explains the copy of the "Desiderata" pinned up in the modest Goal office back in baking Ampara town: "Go placidly amid the noise and haste . . . With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world . . ." It also explains why even the best of aid organisations must keep explaining why projects take longer than intended.
The other great unmentionable is corruption. After the tsunami, amid talk of a deluge of international funding, ordinary Sri Lankans predicted, morosely and with certainty, that much of it would end up in some official's "back pocket". A Sri Lankan lawyer says that "corruption is simply endemic . . . For most people, all the way along the line, it is seen as a right to get a portion of a deal, even if all you have done is sign a document. And sometimes, maybe five people will 'need' to sign that document. There is nothing you can do."
A year ago, police reported that millions of tsunami rupees had been embezzled or misappropriated by local officials. A former president raised questions over government-to-government donations by demanding that the current president, Mahinda Rajapaksa show the people how the 23 billion rupees in the fund had been spent. A newspaper report sparked a police investigation into a number of private bank accounts into which Rajapaksa had deposited 83 million rupees (more than half a million euro) of tsunami cash (which he explained was to allow for faster disbursement of aid). The investigation met a dead end last year when the supreme court ruled that his rights had been violated by the investigation and ordered two senior police officers and a member of parliament to pay substantial fines.
In the meantime, aid agencies were forced to legally challenge the government's attempt to exploit the tragedy by taxing them on money brought into the country.
The last great imponderable of the tsunami is how or whether the funds pledged during the great "mine is bigger than yours" cash auction by the big nations, were delivered.
Two years on, in a BBC Newsnight tracking exercise last December, less than half of the $14 billion (€10.3 billion) promised had arrived; only half of the $6 billion (€4.4 billion) committed had been spent; only a third of the half a million people left homeless (most of them in Banda Aceh, Indonesia) were in permanent housing.
The International Red Cross, found to have spent only $1.3 billion of the $2.2 billion it received, told the programme that it had always said it would take five to seven years to build houses.
It's not unusual, apparently, for cash promised by governments not to emerge. In the aftermath of the Bam earthquake in Iran in 2003, only half of the promised money turned up.
As of last December, of the $60 million promised by Spain to tsunami funds, the $79 million promised by France, the $301 million promised by China, each had delivered around $1 million.
And yet, aid experts such as Jonathan Edgar insist that "how the aid is delivered is more important than how much is delivered". Oxfam was one of the few to publish a report, admitting that it got some things wrong. Surely a trail for others to follow?