| But in the rush to build, some key considerations
got overlooked. Shelters built in low-lying areas ended up flooding
during the rainy season. Tarpaper roofs turned the windowless barracks
into ovens. Aid agencies returned later and built thatched roofs over
the shelters; the difference in temperature was palpable.
“It’s a shame we are all living with,” said Annie
George, head of the council coordinating tsunami relief in Nagapattinam,
the hardest hit district in Tamil Nadu. “The haste in building
temporary shelters cost us more. Every two months, we’re going
back to raise the floor, fix the roof.”
With so much suffering after major disasters, it’s human nature
to want to deliver relief as quickly as possible. But haste can make
waste. A post-tsunami rush to build boats for fishermen produced a
slew of shoddy boats in both India and Indonesia, including some that
a United Nations expert declared not seaworthy.
Such examples point to a need to weigh the benefits of providing
quick relief against the potential costs. Would survivors in Tamil
Nadu have been better off waiting a few weeks for temporary housing
on higher ground? Today, aid agencies face similar dilemmas as they
move into long-term reconstruction for the tsunami-hit areas. Aid
officials caution against acting too quickly, even as survivors grow
impatient for assistance.
“Those who have had their homes and incomes destroyed by the
tsunami deserve to have their lives rebuilt quickly,” said Cherie
Hart, a spokeswoman in Bangkok for the United Nations Development
Program. “Yet the push for rapid results must be balanced against
the need for equitable and sustainable long-term solutions.”
One lesson from the tsunami is that building permanent housing on
such a large scale takes time. Land needed to be found and purchased,
and property rights had to be established for those survivors who
never had deeds or lost them during the tsunami. Proposals to ban
housing in coastal zones ran into stiff opposition from fishermen,
further delaying reconstruction.
The end result: Temporary housing turned out to be not so temporary.
Weeks stretched into months before the first permanent units were
ready for occupancy in Tamil Nadu in September.
The modest but brightly whitewashed homes, funded by Mata Amritanandamayi
Math, an Indian organization, appear worth the wait. Complete with
new streets and power lines, the rows of identical homes resemble
a miniature Levittown, the Long Island suburb built for returning
soldiers from World War II.
The recipients of the 87 homes, whose village of Pudukuppam was devastated
by the tsunami, are among the lucky few. Neighboring Nagapattinam
District alone needs 17,461 homes; the goal is to finish 6,000 to
8,000 of them by Dec. 26, the first anniversary of the tsunami.
Though District Collector Jaganathan Radhakrishnan, the top local
official, said all the houses would be finished by next April, the
aid agencies that are actually building the homes predict it will
take longer.
In retrospect, some aid officials wish more thought had gone into
the temporary shelters, given how long people have wound up staying
in them.
“The process was perhaps pushed too much,” said Coen
Van Kessel, a program officer for the Dutch affiliate of Oxfam, the
aid and advocacy group. “Everyone was working in a hurry. Taking
a bit more time would have been better.”
Instead, families must make do with the single dark room that they
have been allocated in the rows of corrugated tarpaper barracks.
Before this year’s monsoon, a woman named Thennadi prepared
lunch for her family on a makeshift fire outside the entrance to their
room. “It will be difficult to stay here, because of the rain,”
the 28-year-old woman predicted.
Thennadi, who has only one name, dumped fleshy chunks of fish into
a pot of bubbling curry. Her husband, a fisherman, is back at sea,
and the family no longer depends on government handouts of rice and
lentils to eat.
South India’s fishing ports are bustling again, which represents
the other side of the debate over how quickly to rebuild. The rapid
distribution of boats and nets to fishermen enabled them to start
rebuilding their lives on their own, giving them a major psychological
boost.
But the rush to deliver boats came with a price. Anjuppan, a fisherman
in the town of Tharangambadi, insists that a visitor come look at
the boat he received from an aid agency. He lifts up a cover to a
small hold and points inside. “Usually, it takes two years for
water to start seeping in,” he said. “This happened in
a couple months.”
Poor quality also has cropped up in the tsunami-hit regions of Indonesia,
where some of the new fishing boats are not seaworthy, said Michael
Savins, an Australian master boat builder on the United Nations team
in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.
John Kurien, who studies India’s fishing communities at the
Centre for Development Studies in south India, predicted that many
of the new boats won’t last.
“For every 100 boats distributed by . . . [the aid agencies],
my bet is at least a quarter of them will be of bad quality,”
he said. “In the next couple of months, their lifetime will
be completed.”
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