Tamil children learn letters, numbers, songs and dances at a preschool in northwest Sri Lanka. Jesuit Refugee Services runs several such preschools with funding from Catholic Relief Services. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

By Laura Sheahen,

“When the bombing was bad, we didn’t go to school. We were in the bunker,” says 10-year-old Anthony.* “I put my fingers in my ears to shut out the shelling.”

Huddled in a hole dug quickly in the ground, with sandbags to protect them from blasts and tree branches screening their “bunker” from view, Anthony and his mother waited hours with their neighbors until the bombing stopped. Across northern Sri Lanka, thousands of children were doing the same thing, over and over, day after day.

A decades-long civil war in this island nation near India brought tremendous suffering to both sides. It also robbed children of an education. Bombardments destroyed schools and frequent evacuations uprooted students. Eventually, even makeshift classes held under trees became impossible.
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Children in Sri Lanka used to run from bombs, now they are running to class.

Check out this CRS World Report.

For more on CRS work in Sri Lanka, see this story by Laura Sheahen.

In northern Sri Lanka, Naheswari Selvakumar stands near her new CRS-built home. She is a widow with four children. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

The snakes moved in when the people moved out. So did scorpions and biting lizards. In the jungle villages of northern Sri Lanka, nature slowly took over after people abandoned their homes to flee shelling.

A long civil war kept villagers away from home for years. When the war ended in 2009, families left displacement camps and made their way back. Many homes were bombed; sometimes the walls were standing, but the roofs were gone. Thousands of families had to create makeshift shelters out of tarps and salvaged wood. Many slept on the ground.

At night, villagers keep sticks handy to kill creatures that got too close. But with no electricity or lamps to see by, they didn’t always succeed.
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In northern Sri Lanka, Celestamma Sandabale uses a diesel-fueled pump to bring water from a nearby pond to her vegetable garden, where she grows chilies and other produce. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

“My son was a soccer star. He won first prize in our area, and went to the capital for a tournament.” Sixty-five-year-old Pakkiyanathan’s eyes are proud when he remembers his family’s life before war struck his village. “He was excellent.”

A rice farmer with six acres in northern Sri Lanka, Pakkiyanathan was getting by before a catastrophic civil war hit. “Because of God’s grace, I was earning enough money and our lifestyle was OK.” The family had food and shelter, and a steady, if small, source of income.

But starting in 1998, that security began slipping away. Eventually the conflict that had been roiling for decades in this island nation came to their doorstep. “Our village was caught in the middle. Each side was shelling and nine people died, so we left,” he remembers.
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In Sri Lanka, Catholic Relief Services is helping thousands of people affected by the worst natural disaster in the country since the 2004 tsunami.

Heavy monsoon rains, especially in the three eastern districts of Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Amparai, have affected over one million people. In some places, even the temporary camps set up for the flood victims have gone under water.

“Some areas are difficult to access and people are trapped there,” said Father George Sigamoney, Secretary General of Caritas Sri Lanka. “Rivers are overflowing, dams are breaking and the main roads can’t be used. More rain is expected in the next days.”

CRS has committed an initial $20,000 to Caritas Sri Lanka to assist with the flood response. Caritas is currently supporting about 75,000 people with cooked meals, safe drinking water and health care.
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On the island of Sri Lanka, high in the mountains, villagers gather tea leaves just as they’ve done for a century and a half. Every day, they walk over green hills covered with tea plants, stuffing the leaves into sacks that are collected each evening. A 20-pound bag might net them two or three dollars.

The villagers are also living the same way they lived when the tea business here began. They are crowded into dilapidated, ancient row houses built for them long ago by British colonizers. They have no electricity or plumbing. It takes nearly two hours on rough dirt roads for them to get down the mountain to schools or hospitals—that is, if they had cars.

Visiting the tea plantations is like going back in time. But the forgotten villagers can’t go forward.
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A man sits beside his wounded child at a hospital in the eastern port of Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. The child was one of 260 sick and wounded people being ferried out of a makeshift hospital in Sri Lanka’s northern war zone. Photo by Reuters/Stringer, courtesy www.alertnet.org

As world attention turns again to violence in Sri Lanka, hundreds of thousands of civilians remain displaced in the island nation. Of these, an estimated 200,000 are still trapped in a battle zone without sufficient food, water or medical care. Tens of thousands of people who recently left the area have arrived in camps with only the clothes on their backs; many thousands are in need of urgent medical treatment including operations for severe wounds.

Church workers are responding heroically to the crisis, providing relief items and running mobile clinics. With funding from CRS, parish volunteers are giving cooked meals to new arrivals and distributing non-food items including pots, skillets and coconut scrapers (essential in a region where coconut is a staple of the diet). CRS is also supporting partners that provide education for the displaced children.

Displaced Sri Lankans are facing this manmade disaster in the wake of a natural catastrophe: many of those fleeing the recent conflict are also survivors of the 2004 tsunami.

- Laura Sheahen, CRS regional information officer