Time Management:
Neetha Ariyaratne Takes Us Visiting
March, 2005, after the tsunami

By Richard S. Brooks

“Come, come!” she says.  “We are going to Galle and Akuressa and Matara tomorrow.  You can see Suwasetha programs.”

This would be my first chance to have a look at parts of the country hit by the tsunami.  Neetha Ariyaratne would be traveling with two other Sarvodaya staff to sign the papers for renting a house for the Children’s Home in Galle.  She had two social work visits to make.  The first was a board meeting at the newly updated Ratnayake Child Development Centre in Akuressa.  Additionally, she wanted to check on the progress of the home for adult women with disabilities in Matara.  They had just fixed it up and moved the women from the home they had shared with pregnant teenage girls and young mothers in Lunawa, near Moratuwa.  It would be a full day.

Girls at Child Development Center in Akuressa show their trainings in fabrics

This is the same Neetha Ariyaratne whose son was married only two days before the tsunami struck; whose daughter delivered her first child after a difficult pregnancy several weeks later.  The same Neetha who had survived an assassination attempt by a crazed man who had thrown gasoline on her and tried to light her on fire just a few weeks ago. The same Neetha who had taken call after call about orphans and lost parents and young rape victims in the rehabilitation camps.  The same Neetha who sat at her kitchen table figuring out budgets and signing letters day after day while as many as sixteen people were dropping by to eat and talk.   

‘We are sponsoring this baby in Hikkaduwa,” she told me as the van took off at 6:30 the next morning.  “The father had gone to the Sunday market to buy vegetables.  He and his wife had been trying to have babies for seven years and they took the fertility treatment.  This baby was 2 ½ years old when the tsunami came. Baby was swept away 600 metres when his mother, aunt and grandmother died.” 

The story gets complicated after that.  Ari had given a television interview about people affected by the tsunami.  The father saw the interview and called the station.  The station called the founder of the largest non-government organization in Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya.  He gave them his wife’s number and in two days the desperate father reached her.  “We talked for a long time,” Neetha recalled.  “Although he was entitled to a government grant for 15,000 rupees for the funerals, he had spend hours in the queues and got fed up.  I told him to bring all the documents because people would want to be satisfied that his was a genuine case, so he brought the death certificates of the mother and the police report.”

“We gave him milk powder for up to one year and baby rusks, and 1500 rupees because he still has no proper job.  He was so happy he almost cried.  Already he put 500 rupees in savings.”  The baby would live with the man’s sister and seven year old daughter. 

“We already have eighteen children so far like that,” Neetha added.  “The government was going to offer something like 2500 rupees for one year. Can you imagine how to manage with that?”  Then she showed me the stack of letters pleading for sponsorship.  She was getting calls and letters with police reports every day.

In Moratuwa alone there were fifteen camps of “fisher folk,” she said.  “We prepared a huge container of milk at home for three days and took it to the Bolgoda temple.  There were forty pregnant mothers in the camps.  We sent mats so they could sleep on the floor, and biscuits and juices.  The Ministry of Health brought nurses.” 

Families at Bolgoda knew her well.  So did the judges, the probation officials and the parole officials – the same people who could call her when they didn’t know where else to turn for help. This was the same government that botched its promise to pay parents who had lost children and promised to take care of all the children orphaned by the ocean.  When they did not know what else to do, they called Sarvodaya.

Some measure of the woman is the fact that with hundreds of children and families in her care already, she continually adds more on her own initiative.  Suwasetha, unlike some of its international counterparts, is not flush with unending money and fancy facilities.  Its buildings are often less than spectacular examples of institutional design.  They are dark, and Spartan.  But you can see something in the faces of the girls who live there that lets you know they are loved. 

 “We already have eighteen children so far like that,” Neetha added.  “The government was going to offer something like 2500 rupees for one year. Can you imagine how to manage with that?” 
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Even those whose rusty wheelchairs roll across the expansive parlor floors in their beautiful old home in Matara take care of each other.  They have been family for decades.  Neetha had made sure they wanted to move there before converting the home donated by the judge’s family to Sarvodaya.  They felt the sea breeze and saw how much room they would have under the veranda.  You could tell.  It would be home.

* * * * * * *

On the way to Galle, we stop at what looks like a toll booth by the temple.  This is a pleasant inversion of what we might see on the interstate in the U.S.  It’s for alms giving - an investment in the future and appreciation for the day.   “I remember so, so many beggars here right after the tsunami,” Neetha says.  “People just looking around for water or food.  Just not knowing what to do. There were bodies everywhere.”

We turn left onto a road into the interior, driver weaving through traffic that has thinned out from Lorries and buses to bicycles, garden tractors, and the occasional intercity van.  We look at the paddy fields for a while when Neetha remembers a spot from less happy times.

“We were driving here to sign the papers for the house in Akuressa,” she recalls.  “It was 1989, when the JVP was very active and it was dangerous to travel.  There were all these checkpoints and the military would stop you and say ‘we want this vehicle’…then just take it!  So to avoid that I got in the front seat to let people know it was Sarvodaya. We had a letter from the Divisional Commander of the Army saying not to bother us.”

“Anyway, at a checkpoint right here…” (she points to the spot)  the Army fellows stopped us and started asking questions.  But the letter worked for us.  “Ah!  Sarvodaya!”  they said. Then one of them waved his rifle and turned to the side of the road where there were dead bodies.  He asked a very strange question—are you eating well?  Do you eat meat?”

“This is one of the leaders of the JVP,” he said, pointing to one body.  We were so stunned and frightened we could barely speak, but we left them.  As soon as I could I told this to General Ranatunga.  “This is the way your boys are behaving,” I said. “You could see why the roads where completely empty then.  They were haunted.” 

* * * * * * *

Suddenly we stopped at a roadside boutique—a corner store—and the driver asked directions.  He turned around and asked four more times before finding a tiny pathway with tire tracks just wide enough to suggest that it might be a road for something larger than a bicycle.  Neetha, the Suwasetha treasurer and another fellow in the back seat bounced up and down as the Jeep bumped from one mud hole to the next.  We had one of the “boys” who normally hung around headquarters doing odd jobs sitting way in the back.  He head hit the ceiling a few times.  Two kilometers or so, to the left again and stop.  Ask directions.  Cross the bridge past the irrigation ditch.  Up the hill and stop in front of the four unfinished walls of a house with no roof or windows. 

There stood a woman not four feet six inches tall with her five children, including one and a half year old twins.  “Father drowned in the tsunami,” Neetha began.  She read about them in the paper and called the housemother at Suwasetha’s home for children.  “I thought a woman should go and get the details,” she continued.
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There stood a woman not four feet six inches tall with her five children, including one and a half year-old twins.  “Father drowned in the tsunami,” Neetha began.
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“When she got here she saw that the sixteen year old , ten year old, eight year old and twins were not only without their forty-eight year old father; they had no beds, no roof or any furniture except a table and one chair.  “We got a donation of 50,000 rupees ($50) from a Buddhist monk so they could get some help with food and finishing the house.” 

Her story is interrupted by a rapidly growing group of neighbors including onlookers, aunts, uncles, and a young man with cerebral palsy - silent but interested in all the commotion.  The mother cried, “They found the body on January 28 under the mud,” she says. “There were five bodies in one pit.” 

Mrs. Chandrwati greets Mr. Kannangara of Sarvodaya (Left); her new house (Center); and with family members (Right)

By now twenty-two people have gathered in the hot sun.  There is nothing to drink so they quickly crack some coconuts and pour milk into tiny glasses as Neetha brings today’s gifts—backpacks full of supplies, clothing for the kids and vouchers for shoes.  A box of food and a folding plastic picnic table which must have come in the tons of assorted donations from America, Abu Dhabi and Germany.  Who knows what else they could find if they went through the mountains of plastic bags at Sarvodaya headquarters?   

The housemother from Akuressa will give 25,000 rupees in one payment then 10,000 at a time to a contractor, Neetha tells me.  She is encouraging and encouraged.  Three months after the father died everyone nearby will gather for an alms-giving ceremony.  The family will have to feed them all, but they will receive gifts from many people. 

“What is your name?”  she asks each of the older children in Sinhala.  She strokes the hair of one of the boys then asks him to spell out his name for her.  He is proud to do so.  “They walk forty minutes from here every day to school,” she says.  “Can you imagine what happens if there is an illness in the night?  My goodness!” 

She honors each child by asking them to sign their name on the paper that confirms they received their school packs.  The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee must know that each of the backpacks they provided received this kind of care and that each went to a child with a name. 

Neetha talked with the children’s grandmother and uncles, holding one of the twins in her arms and teasing him.  I tripped as my sandals scraped on the hard cement floor.  Not one member of the family wore shoes. 

Time to go.

Some would say that this kind of “side trip” doesn’t seem very efficient, or that the founder of Suwasetha and the wife of the President of Sarvodaya should be delegating such tasks to subordinates - like the housemother, who had already visited twice and would come again.  But the look of wonder in this family’s eyes suggested that through the sadness and hardship they could also see something at work that would renew their faith in a world that had treated them badly.

I think Neetha wanted me to come for a reason.