Community Trust Fund: Caring for Confined Widows

BY JEFF GREENWALD | March 24, 2005

Country: Sri Lanka

Topics: Tsunami, Women

On the morning of December 26, 2004, residents of Trincomalee - one of the northeastern Sri Lanka's major harbor cities - witnessed an eerie, unfamiliar sight. The water in scenic Mattikali Bay receded and disappeared, leaving behind a muddy, boulder-filled depression. Moments later, the ocean surged back with overwhelming force - taking more than a thousand lives and eventually displacing more than 35,000 families.

The tsunami also widowed hundreds of women across Sri Lanka, including Trincomalee. With the large population of Muslims in the district, this led to a delicate situation: Muslim tradition requires widows to mourn for four months and 10 days without seeing any outside faces (except for their sons, or women in their immediate families). In keeping with this tradition, widows in the devastated village of Kinniya, just south of Trincomalee, were confined to tents in a special camp, where they will remain until mid-May.

Mercy Corps, through a grant from the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, helped a local organization respond to the plight of these women and their children. The Community Trust Fund, launched in 1993 to address the needs of families displaced by Sri Lanka's long-simmering civil war, purchased emergency relief and household supplies for 325 widows, as well as educational materials, clothes and sports items for 665 children in the affected area.

On January 20, hundreds of bright red buckets, plastic water-holders, and bright school bags were neatly stacked at a camp run by a religious organization called Jamath Islam.

"As it happened, this was right before the Islamic holiday of Id ul-Allah, which marks the beginning of pilgrimages to Mecca," said Joseph Xavier Bastianpillai, the Community Trust Fund's silver-haired deputy program director. "Since Id is traditionally celebrated with charitable acts, our distributions were very well timed."

Under supervision from the Community Trust Fund and Mercy Corps, friends and relations of the widows and children - dressed in colorful, patterned head shawls - assembled to pick up and deliver the supplies to their close friends and relations.

"Many of these women, especially the ones living close to the seashore, lost absolutely everything, their complete households," said Mr. Bastianpillai, a former construction supervisor and automobile engineer. "Even to have tea, they didn't have a cup. And although other relief organizations had provided food, there was nothing to cook with! During the distribution, we could see by the faces of the women and children how helpful this was. It supported their needs, and improved their mental state."

The Community Trust Fund identified other relief-effort gaps in Trincomalee and secured another subgrant from Mercy Corps to continue serving those in need.