From Landmark:
Quote
The distinction: Making a difference
Feeling good does not make a difference
Deep understanding does not make a difference
Having an insight does not make a difference
[b:b614ae4d4c]Helping someone does not make a difference
Having information does not make a difference[/b:b614ae4d4c]
From The New Yorker:
January 16, 2005
AFTER THE FLOOD
THE THIRD "R"
The South Indian fishing village of Komitichavadi, about seventy-five
miles south of Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, is
situated on a stretch of coast that was particularly hard hit by the
tsunami. In the neighboring hamlets, fifty-nine people, mostly babies
and the elderly, were killed. Hundreds were injured, and many are
missing. In Komitichavadi, however, not a single person died; everyone
has been accounted for.
The villagers owe their good fortune to the quick thinking of Govind,
the headman of the local panchayat, a traditional village council of a
kind that exists all over rural India. On the morning of the tsunami,
Govind received a call on his cell phone from his wife. She was in
Chennai, where she had felt tremors from the earthquake off Indonesia,
a thousand miles away. Soon, Govind noticed the ocean rising, and his
wife called again. The waters were flooding the beach promenade in
Chennai, she said, and people were being swept away; she begged her
husband to escape. Instead, Govind rushed to the ocean, where children
were playing and fishermen were sorting through their catch. He ran
along the beach, waving his arms in the air, warning everyone to flee.
A few minutes later, the water rushed in. "Everyone just ran,"
Govind said. "They didn't even have time to save their nets. They
just ran up the hill to the temple and sat and waited."
Though no one died, the village was destroyed. Fifteen homes along the
waterfront were demolished. More than a hundred boats were lost;
fishing nets, some worth almost as much as the boats, were damaged or
lost. The village prawn farm, where forty people were employed and a
new building had just been constructed, has been shut down. January is
usually a big month for fishermen: they can earn as much as ten
thousand rupees (more than two hundred and twenty dollars) a week. Now
those earnings, as well as those for the coming months, are lost.
People involved in crisis management like to refer to "the three
'R's": rescue, relief, and rehabilitation. The last stage is in
many ways the most important, as well as the most expensive and
time-consuming-and therefore the most widely ignored. For now, the
aid is flowing in; people seem resigned to living off charity for a few
months. But once that dries up it's anyone's guess what the
villagers of South India are going to do to get by.
On a sunny afternoon ten days after the tsunami, Govind, who is
forty-seven, sat in his living room, the green walls decorated with
portraits of deities, and spoke about the panchayat's relief work.
The sea was visible through his front door; it was calm, but the beach
was deserted. There were no boats or ships on the water.
Immediately after the tsunami, Govind said, everyone had congregated by
the temple, under a sprawling banyan tree. The whole village, in
effect, had become a refugee camp. With no aid or government workers in
sight, Govind borrowed a hundred and thirty thousand rupees (almost
three thousand dollars) from some neighboring landowners and used the
money to buy rice and build makeshift tents outside the temple.
A few days later, government aid workers finally showed up and assessed
the damage. Relief-in the form of rice, kerosene, and two bedsheets
per family-arrived soon after. No relief has come from international
aid agencies. "We're not Nagapattinam," Govind said, referring to
a part of the coast where thousands had died. "But we're still
scared."
With other members of the panchayat, Govind went to see the local
district collector, the highest-ranking bureaucrat in the region, fifty
miles away. Govind told the collector, "Food and clothes and pots and
pans are fine, but we need boats and motors and nets to keep alive. We
need to start new lives." The collector promised to help. The
panchayat gave him a list of those who lost boats, nets, or houses.
Last Thursday, early in the morning, a group of four volunteers pulled
up at Govind's house in a maroon Maruti. Govind was outside brushing
his teeth. They introduced themselves. Two of them, a man and a woman,
were from Bangalore, more than two hundred miles inland, and two were
locals. They were not affiliated with any organization; they had raised
money and materials from friends.
Govind was thrilled to see aid workers. He took them to the beach,
showed them how far the water had reached, and described how the boats
had been sucked out to sea. He pointed out a damaged boat from another
village that had washed ashore. They were struck by the neatness of the
waterfront: the debris had mostly been cleared. They asked Govind how
many people had died in Komitichavadi, and Govind said none. This
seemed to disappoint the people from Bangalore. The woman mentioned
that the scene did not much resemble what she had seen on TV. They had
come looking, one of the workers later said, for "places that had
been really destroyed."
The group spent about half an hour in the village. As they were
leaving, Govind asked, "Are you actually going to help us, or are you
just passing through?"
They drove back onto the main road and headed south to a village about
forty miles away. Sixteen people had died there, and twenty-five in the
next village. Two hundred homes had been destroyed. The woman from
Bangalore was much happier with this village. She said that it was a
better use of her aid.
- Akash Kapur