Rice in Small Batches

Farouk pours paddy into his rice mill. "If Mercy Corps had not helped me, I might be looking for another job." Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Rice is the staple of Sri Lankan cuisine. It's typically consumed at every meal, either in its familiar granular form or in variations with names like hoppers, string hoppers and pittu.

Eastern Sri Lanka is one of the country's main rice-producing regions, and our last stop today was a small, family-owned rice mill in Ampara District. It's common for small rice farmers, and even consumers in some areas of Sri Lanka, to buy rice paddy harvested from the fields and get it milled themselves. People say the small-batch milling results in better-tasting rice. And the owners of this particular mill, 42-year-old Farouk and his wife Thakwa Umma, have the customers to prove it.

The family lives a few hundred meters from the shoreline, and the 2004 tsunami sent about three feet of water onto the family's property and into the garage-sized milling facility that Farouk had built two years earlier. The water flooded the motor that ran his mill, damaged his rice-cleaning machine and caused fissures in the large plaster slab where he laid paddy out to dry.

In the aftermath of the disaster, no relief organization was interested in helping them; the immediate needs of homeless survivors took precedent. Farouk went to the bank and came home discouraged after they wanted the deed to his property in exchange for less than a US$900 loan. He became a part-time rickshaw driver and "depended on the gods."

In mid-2006, Mercy Corps launched a three-year program to help people recover livelihoods affected by the tsunami. Farouk and Thakwa Umma's mill was one of 36 in Ampara District that Mercy Corps helped with new machinery and facility repairs. Farouk had already gotten his motor up and running, so we gave him a new rice-cleaning machine (which cut his processing time), repaired cracks in his facility walls, and refinished the outside paddy-drying area critical to his operation.

So today you can bring your freshly harvested paddy to Farouk and he'll boil it for an hour, dry it in the Sri Lankan sun for another three or four, then mill it and clean it — all for 200 rupees, or about US$1.75. He mills anywhere from a few 50-kilo bags a day to nine or ten. In truth, he'd probably be happy to mill one. "If Mercy Corps had not helped me, I might be looking for another job."