| Day One | Day Two | Day Three | Day Four | Day Five | Future Plans |
Our first day in India we hit the ground running by heading out the door at 8am on Sunday morning after we arrived to go straight to the orphanage. We knew the kids that we had come to work with, the tsunami orphans, weren't yet in Madras because they were studying at their village schools.
But we had invited Semester at Sea students to come and work with us at the Tambarum orphanage and we had also decided that kids were kids, orphans were orphans, created by the tsunami or not, and so we would do what we had planned on with them.
We arrived at the orphanage to see children sitting in polite and exact groups; there were 150 children, all boys from what we could see of various ages, from five until some in their late teens. A small group of girls later joined us from the nearby girls' dormitory where the female orphans are housed. The girls are an older range then the boys and are a smaller group. They sat at the front and kept very much to themselves, reminding us all that the gender rules are still very much in effect.
The bus with the thirty-five Semester at Sea volunteers arrived and the morning was on. Games, games, and more games had everyone laughing, sweating, and tired by the time it came to be a bit calmer with arts and crafts. The children were exhausted by the time we were done (as were we) and we were glad to have provided them with an afternoon of entertainment, education about the globe, conversational English, and in general the attention and care of 40 adults from around the world. This day turned out to be the trial run for the rest of our time working with the children of the auxiliary orphanage in Karikal.
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In order to get to the kids we had come to see, we rose early Monday and traveled with two of the orphanage workers from Shri Saradha Sakthi Peetam, Pakkirasamy and Ramesh, to drive the five hours to Karikal, one of the many fishing villages affected by the tsunami. We arrived in Karikal to find our hotel on the fly; because of the many NGO workers in the area, we finally found lodging at our third hotel. Settling in we prepared for the evening when we'd first see the kids we'd come to think of as ours.
That night, we arrived at the temporary orphanage to be greeted by smiles and excitement from thirty children who overwhelmed us with their joy in being with us.
We tried the games we'd run as practice on our group in Chennai; some where successful, some not. The children introduced themselves and we learned how they had been affected by the tsunami; some had lost both parents, some only one, but the remaining parent was unable to provide for their schooling or to look after their needs. There was fear in the village of the kids staying outside of their neighborhoods and so the peetam goes every night to pick up kids after school to come to the orphanage to learn, to eat, and then are returned. The government has ordered that these children cannot be moved until after they take their exams later this month. Because of this the peetam established a temporary house where many of the boys stay and the rest of the children come during the evening hours. Again the girls aren't as many as the boy; but this time there are children who are at the peetam with their brothers and sisters because they'd lost all their relatives.
A sweaty two hours later, after introductions, learning songs in English, playing games in Tamil as well as English, we arrived at the time for the kids to go and eat their dinner. They happily ran off to eat, many of the little ones falling asleep in their dinner.
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In the morning (some of us had been up since 4:30am not being able to sleep), we rose to get a tour of the nearby affected areas and interview the people whose children we were working with. We went through three villages in the affected area, Nagapattinum, Karikal, and Karikalmeda. The outward signs of destruction were gone, however, the temporary shelters that various people had erected were appearing here with makeshift villages being relocated in them. In the relocation facilities, made of corrugated tin and roofing materials, the new spaces had taken a month to build and families were occupying them for the last three days. Eighty six families lost their homes in the Karikal area; thirty were now living in the freshly erected twenty square feet structures and had only been living there for about three days. They expressed to us that besides the shelters they were living in, they had nothing. A few things had been given to them such as clothing. A young mother described how those who hadn't died had ingested much of the water while trying to avoid drowning. The contaminated tsunami water had infected many people and her five year old daughter had bleeding teeth as a result of the water. A doctor from Delhi was supposed to come and see her, he had yet to arrive.
We interviewed people, their children, and in general got a sense of the utter devastation the tsunami caused the morning of December 26th. The people were eager to share their stories and welcomed us into their homes, even offering us things to eat, while interrupting their own meals to invite us in. In each place Ramesh, the peetam worker with us, spoke about the orphanage's project and encouraged people to send their children if they needed something, or needed to be protected at night. The van is open to anyone who wants to come and it's a safe haven in the often shifting climate for these children in villages where status quo balances of power have changed since the deaths and destruction.
We heard stories of how people ran when the water came, they headed to higher ground, of children hiding in trees, parents running to the hospital to look for their kids. In the afternoon we toured Nagapattiam, one of the most affected fishing villages in the area. There were at least a hundred boats strewn around the area with a toppled crane and other fragments of the fishing industry. There were men challenging the kids we interviewed and were taking pictures of; the government was paying fishermen a stipend to replace their lost livelihoods. However well intentioned, this payment had thus far ensured that the men weren't working or seeking work, but rather a reputation of gang groupings is springing up around the village. A couple people expressed that they thought the tsunami had only hurt the bad people and that it in fact was a good thing because many of the village bullies had passed away in it.
That night we were with the kids again, and preparing for their excitement upon seeing our craft materials. The plan was to take the older children and have then write/draw about their experiences with the tsunami while the younger children drew cards back to children in America who had written to them. The plan is for the school in the States, Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee, FL to partner with the orphanage to help these children know that they are loved, cared for, and that others in the world want to know about them and care for them. The Deerlake students made cards and brought beanie baby toys to give to the children at the orphanage. We also had new crayons, makers, color pencils, coloring books and stationary to make arts and crafts with the little ones. Their joy at these simple treasures was (is) overwhelming.
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We toured burial sites today as we saw one place were over 300 people were buried, their clothes left in a nearby field in case loved ones wanted to take them. Of course no one did, they were scared to take the clothing of dead people, afraid of bad luck, evil curses, or even the pain of seeing the clothes of those who had passed. There the clothing lay next to the mostly unmarked and very modest burial site. A few gravestones marked the place; those paid for by surviving family members. One, a white stone with yellow writing dedicated to a mother and her son buried together, another a marble grey stone marking the place where ten children were.
A man came up to us while we were at the site, telling us that an office building was going to be put up there but in the rush of the moment the government had taken possession of the land to bury the bodies. People still want to build here he said but now the land has bodies on it.
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Chennai, India
A couple members of the team went over to Marina beach in Chennai to take a survey of the damage there in order to understand what the impact had been there. There were appromixately three hundred deaths in Chennai from the tsunami at Marina beach. The section of the beach we saw was utterly rubble that had not been cleared from the site. There was a makeshift slum lined up about thirty feet from the shoreline, most likely where it was before the tsunami, and the people making ends meet as they could. One team member felt strongly that toys should be distributed to these children and so we did, a few smiley face balls and baby rattles. The sight of us, the five of us walking up to the beach with bright yellow bags was enough to bring a beginning curious crowd as people began to speak their stories and opinions to us as we walked by. When we began handing things out however, the situation got out of hand. We were swarmed in thirty seconds by a crow of fifty people, overwhelmed by hands grabbing at whatever they could get, despite our attempt to distribute evenly to everyone. In the end we had to drop the bags where we were and walk away, while people continued to ask for more, berate us for passing them by when they had four or five children on our way down to the beach. It was perhaps the most emotional part of the trip, seeing the utter need, and the bleak current state of where these people were living. Politics, caste, and economics have kept this particular section of Marina as it was the morning of the tsunami; dust, debris, and the rubble remains of concrete structures extends as far as the eye can see. For our last day in India, it is a sobering reminder of all that still needs to be done.
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Future plans:
и Establishing a sister school relationship between both orphanages and States side children of similar age.
и Increasing involvement of college students in the area both with the orphans as well as in the reconstruction project. There are several needs in this area and many groups to work with; including helping students to connect for a three/six/ or eight week reconstruction project.
и Teaching skills to the villagers who have lost everything such as swimming, a small trade, reading to the adults.