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Thursday, October 13, 2005
Andaman islanders adjust to tsunami-changed world
Dilip Thar puts the finishing touches to a statue of the Hindu goddess Durga on the porch of his damaged home, now standing forlornly in a small lake that the tsunami left in his village on South Andaman island.
Other half-finished statues, some headless or limbless, are scattered about the property, facing buildings without roofs or walls in the village where sea water ripples in the breeze now instead of wheat stalks.
It's a bleak post-tsunami tableau.
The 9.15 earthquake on Dec. 26 shook India's Andaman and Nicobar islands like never before and was soon followed by 10-metre-high tsunami waves that came rolling up the estuary towards Sippighat.
'There was heavy shaking that day,' Thar said, yellow clay smeared on his hands and face. 'And after that, for an hour the tsunami waves are coming.'
The statue he is making of Durga, mother goddess and demon killer, shows a 10-armed woman riding a lion and wearing a decidedly menacing expression. Thar said it should be ready in time for Dusshera, a major Indian festival celebrating the victory of good over evil.
Thar himself is feeling a small measure of triumph over tragedy. Business for the clay statues is good, with Dusshera coming in mid-October and Deepavali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, in early November.
He spends the night in a corrugated tin shelter at Brichgunj atop a hill in Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands. In the morning, he rides a bicycle provided by an aid group a few kilometres down the road to his house, now listing slightly in its watery yard.
'Very good conditions there,' he said of Brichgunj, where 156 families live in 25 barracks and are provided with daily food rations, fresh water and electricity. 'But we need money for permanent homes."
WOOD OR CONCRETE?
That is not going to happen any time soon for the 38,000 people living in nearly 10,000 shelters around the islands.
"The time period for permanent settlements is at least two years," said Lieutenant General Aditya Singh, commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, who headed the tsunami relief effort until the end of July.
The government has been talking for months with islanders and aid groups about what sort of houses to build -- concrete homes with tile floors like those to be built in tsunami-struck areas of the Indian mainland, or traditional wooden houses on stilts.
After the tsunami it allowed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to work for the first time in the Nicobar Islands -- home to some of the most primitive tribes on earth -- albeit under close supervision.
The discussion with NGOs over home designs is a breath of fresh air in the island group, said Samil Acharya, who heads the Society for Andaman & Nicobar Ecology (SANE), a frequent critic of the government.
"Nicobarese live in stilted wooden houses with thatched roofs. Now they expect concrete houses with tile floors, after seeing some prototypes from the government and NGOs," Acharya said.
Such houses are environmentally unsuitable on islands where the topography has changed drastically in many areas, he said.
The epicentre of the earthquake on Dec. 26, the strongest in 45 years, was just 130-140 km (80-90 miles) from Great Nicobar island and the tsunami followed within minutes.
After sorting out all the missing on the 37 inhabited islands that stretch across 800 km (500 miles), the Indian government puts the death toll at 3,513.
SALT SATURATED
General Singh said in an interview that many islands had sunk a metre or two. One island, Teresa, broke into three. At least 5,000 hectares (12,300 acres) have disappeared under the sea and 3 million trees along the coast have been lost.
Much of the fertile land by the coast, where islanders had their homes and coconut plantations, is still under water or saturated with salt after the tsunami receded.
"The mainstay of the Nicobar island tribes is coconuts. It takes 10 years after planting seedlings before you get full production," Acharya said, adding that restoring livelihoods to coastal residents would be a major challenge.
Sippighat, about 10 km (six miles) from Port Blair on South Andaman island, is one of those waterlogged sites.
The government is building a series of expensive sea walls near the village to keep the waves at bay.
"The sea wall is good," the artisan Thar said. "We can re-establish here. Before the tsunami, there was an old Japanese sea wall but it's gone after the tsunami. It's for our safety."
But Acharya said the new sea walls would not keep out huge waves, or allow salt water ponds left by the tsunami to drain off, or stop rainwater from washing salt off farmland.
"It's a mindless thing," he said. "It increases the danger of malaria. Seawater can't enter, but rainwater can't escape, so large areas get waterlogged and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
The government says no malaria cases have been reported in the area and suggests the pools of saltwater that dot the islands in areas where crops were once grown can be turned into shrimp and fish farms.
Source: Reuters - USA
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