Sri Lanka - blog from Menik Farm camp

Katy Attfield, a humanitarian specialist working for DFID, visited the Menik Farm camps near Vavuniya in the north of Sri Lanka at the end of August after the early rains. Here she describes what conditions are like for the hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes by the recent conflict, who remain in camps hoping for a brighter future.

History of a camp

The sprawling tangle of tents and plastic huts which constitutes most of the Menik Farm camp was originally just one ‘relief village’- a neat grid of semi-permanent barrack blocks built to accommodate the relatively small number of people originally expected to arrive fleeing the conflict area to the north.

The other main zones were hurriedly and roughly hewn from the inhospitable jungle as the trickle of displaced people became a stream and then a flood. When 100,000 people arrived practically overnight in April 2009, they set their few salvaged possessions down amongst the jungle scrub and trees. In total there are more than 20 sites in and around Vavuniya, which are now home to an estimated quarter of a million people.

An early wake-up call

For many weeks now, the approaching monsoon season has been a feared spectre in the lives of the civilians in the camps, as well as in the minds of the Sri Lankan military and civilian authorities who are responsible for assisting them. 
There was worry, there was planning, there were contingency scenarios.  There was discussion with the UN agencies and the other NGOs who take a lead on providing shelter and decent water and sanitation facilities.  Then all of a sudden last weekend, there was rain.

After only about five hours of heavy rain over two days, low-lying parts of the camps were under water and thousands of people had to either rescue belongings from water trickling under the tent floor, or in some cases even temporarily abandon their makeshift homes.  This will certainly be much worse when the real monsoon starts next month and has added to the growing sense of urgency among the Sri Lankan authorities to get people returned to their homes as quickly as possible. 

Visit to Zone 2 – Crammed but coping

It is astonishing that, despite everything, even zone 2 now looks quite clean and neat.  There are rubbish bins made out of halved oil drums along the roads, and people are given black plastic sacks to keep the flies off rubbish. The Department for International Development is funding Oxfam to distribute these small but essential items. They have also been able to train a whole network of volunteers to give hygiene promotion lessons to children and adults alike, and the messages appear to be sinking in. 

The grid of roads surrounding each 200 acre block is in all senses the circulation system of the camp.  Not only because they bring the food trucks and water bowsers, the ambulances and aid agency vehicles, but because of all the other services which flow along them.  These narrow strips of red compacted earth, most only just wide enough for two 4WD vehicles to pass, are under pressure.  The coming rains will cause flooding, that is certain.  What is not so certain is how bad it will be.  A plan has been devised to dig drainage channels at the sides of all these roads, linking into a network which will carry as much as possible of the floodwater away.

Another ‘life-line’ running along the sides of these roads is the network of water pipes which feed standpipes dotted all over the site.  This water is not purified for drinking, but comes directly from where it is pumped out of the nearby river through a system devised by the Sri Lankan Water Board supported with DFID money.

The difficulty of distributing enough of this precious resource is obvious to see.  Lines of plastic jerrycans line up at each tank when it is empty: a virtual queue of people, each of whose owners can then identify their apparently identical can when it comes to filling and retrieving it after the bowser finally arrives.

Visit to Zone 3 – Children’s hope survives everything

Zone 3 is the oldest of Menik Farm’s temporary zones, it has had more time to turn into a community.  Most people have little kitchen gardens next to their plastic sheeting walls, banana trees are starting to grow, sheets of cadjan (woven palm fronds) lend a more homely look to the roofs.

Another source of astonishment - we all know that children can use art to express things which they can’t easily say, and kids in conflict-affected places will sometimes incorporate violent images or pictures of guns and soldiers.  But young artists have used the shelter walls as their canvas – to draw amazing images of wildlife, local scenery and Hindu myths – not an attack helicopter or AK47 in sight.

Visit to Zone 4 – Worse is yet to come

This was the zone worst affected by the recent early rains, and some of tents are looking the worse for wear.  Funded by DFID, some of these tents had to be air-lifted in to accommodate so many new arrivals after the end of the conflict, and even the 2x2 timber and plastic sheeting used in other zones is a precious resource which is difficult and expensive to replace. Humanitarian aid is never a luxury solution at the best of times, and this situation is certainly no different.
It is hard to say what the rainy season will bring when it arrives in full force, but two things at least appear certain to me.  Firstly, the more people are able to leave Menik Farm before it strikes, to return home safely and rebuild their lives, the better. Secondly those remaining in Menik Farm and other camps will need the combined help of the Government and the aid community pulling together to give them the chance of a brighter future.

Katy Attfield – Humanitarian Specialist