In Sri Lanka, Caritas officials stymied by lack of aid coordination

Published: 2005-07-19

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (CNS) -- On a 10-acre jungle tract filled with wild elephants, church workers struggled to build 100 temporary shelters for families displaced six months earlier by the Dec. 26 tsunamis. "We cannot do much in a situation like this," said Father Francis Dias, coordinator of the church's tsunami relief work in Trincomalee, on Sri Lanka's east coast. In another area, rows of three dozen temporary houses built by Caritas and the Trincomalee-Batticaloa Diocese remained unoccupied for two weeks after the completion of the work at the end of June because government officials had not selected the program's beneficiaries. "Our work is over, but, they (government officials) are yet to choose the people who should live in these," said Father Dias. In Batticaloa, Father T. Sritharan Sylvester was pleading with a local official to expedite allotment of land for the church to build temporary shelters. "Our initial plan was to build 10,000 transitional houses in the diocese," said Father Sylvester, director of the Eastern Human and Economic Development Center, social action wing for the Batticaloa-Trincomalee Diocese. Six months after the tsunamis, Caritas had initiated work on only 6,000 of the 26,000 transitional shelters it planned to build across the nation.

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