“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” Sir Isaac Newton said. What does physics have to with the coming of the next Asian New Year? The New Year brings promises of hope and new beginnings. On December 26, 2004, a tsunami slammed into and rolled over the coast of Sri Lanka (and other parts of South Asia), leaving 30,000 dead in Sri Lanka alone and as many as 8,000 still missing as of January 8, 2005, according to the International Medical Health Organization’s (IMHO) website. The tsunami displaced 603,849 people in Sri Lanka, many of whom are children. To help put this in perspective, Hurricane Katrina displaced 330,000 citizens according to a news release dated September 10, 2005, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) website. In either case, Dr. Thau Thambi-Pillai, who spoke at RWC on January 25, feels these numbers are unacceptable.
The students and faculty at RWC invited Dr. Thambi-Pillai UC Medical Center Transplant Specialist, to provide an update on how the various levels of progress have affected not only the redevelopment of the country, but also to instill in the citizens of Sri Lanka that once again they will be complete. This invitation was a follow-up to a presentation Dr. Thambi-Pillai did a year ago, during the initial aftermath of the tsunami.
This time, Dr. Thambi-Pillai spoke of many positive changes occurring in Sri Lanka during the year since the tsunami, some of which were immediate. For example, one of the first things needed to be done was the prevention of communicable disease. In order to rebuild, one must be healthy, he said.
Along with the help of international charities and volunteers, like IMHO, survivors were given clean drinking water, food, clothing and shelter.
During the second phase of the recovery effort, Dr. Thambi-Pillai spoke of healing the mental and physical injuries. Society in Sri Lanka is very family orientated, and with so many children without mothers and fathers, husbands without wives, and parents without children, there is a strong need for psychological counseling. The children who were without family were placed in orphanages. Volunteers were building orphanages that would house eight to ten children of the same age with a matron or motherly type figure to watch over them.
Dr. Thambi-Pillai said that the third phase of recovery is creating permanent housing, along with vocational training to help with self-sufficiency.
However, probably the most important part of recovery, he said, is the creation of welfare programs for the children of Sri Lanka. It is in these children that the future can be found.