A saviour to disaster survivors

Manila, Philippines: For some time he entertained the thought that he might have been a victim of a hoax.

When 33-year-old Ananda Galappatti of Sri Lanka received a phone call in July and was told that he had won the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, he couldn’t believe.

Ananda Galappatti / Photo credit: Google Images

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) chose Galappatti for “his spirited personal commitment to bring appropriate and effective psychosocial services to survivors of war and natural disasters in Sri Lanka.”

The award category “recognises an individual, 40 years of age or younger, for outstanding work on issues of social change in his or her community, but whose leadership may not yet be broadly recognised outside of this community.”

“I was told to keep it a secret until the official announcement,” he laughs. That meant keeping it to himself for several weeks. After a week, when the official written announcement about the award had not yet arrived, Galappatti began to wonder if it was true.

But the other person on the phone, RMAF president Carmencita Abella, seemed to know a lot about him and the work he has done, Galappatti recalls, and that put some of his doubts to rest. One is not always prepared for great news. Not when one had been in the midst of so much bad news.

Non-material needs

Preparedness is perhaps one of the things there is never enough of when a big natural disaster strikes. Galappatti knows this too well.

In the aftermath, human intervention is often hurried and improvised, even disorganised. There is a rush to provide material aid and comfort with supplies of food, water, shelter, clothing and medicines.

But what about the non-material needs? How to ease the grief, the shock, the loss? How to rebuild not just one’s home but one’s confidence as well, and find the courage to move on? As the saying goes, bread alone is not enough.

In 2004, Sri Lanka bore the brunt of the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands and devastated large areas of Asia from Indonesia, to Thailand, to the Maldives.

One of the worst hit was Batticaloa, a district on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka. Already battered by years of war, Batticaloa suddenly suffered an unprecedented deadly blow from nature.

Galappatti, a psychologist by training, went to Batticaloa to coordinate the psychosocial aspects of the relief and rehabilitation work. He was one of the founders of The Mangrove, a network of organisations and individuals in Batticaloa dedicated to this type of effort.

Born in London to a highly educated family, Galappatti spent his early childhood in Sri Lanka. He attended high school in Bangladesh. Then he went to Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to study psychology. In 1996, he returned to Sri Lanka only to find a country mired in conflict and violence.

Shortly after his return, Galappatti assisted Dr. Gameela Samarasinghe in a psychosocial epidemiological survey of conflict zones. The survey revealed that 40 to 65 percent of people in those zones displayed signs of post-traumatic stress.

Sadly, Sri Lanka’s practitioners in this field were few and far between.

Capacity building during conflicts

To address this lack of experts, Samarasinghe and Galappatti formed the War Trauma and Psychosocial Support Program (PSP). The latter, only 24 years old at that time, embarked on a capacity-building program that involved training 20 psychosocial workers to serve the towns, villages, hospitals and refugee camps of Vavuniya, a war-torn district six hours from the capital Colombo.

Practitioners in the psychosocial field underwent training in new crisis intervention methods aided by resources such as data bases and manuals. Galappatti adapted Western psychology to Sri Lankan culture.

So when the tsunami struck on December 26, 2004, Galappatti was not exactly starting from scratch. A few weeks after the disaster, Galappatti, along with his colleague, founded The Mangrove.

Galappatti did not want to be a “fly-in, fly-out” type of aid worker or a come-and-go expert. He stayed in Batticaloa, working as The Mangrove’s volunteer coordinator.

He linked up with local, national and international agencies. He gave briefings, set up a rapid assessment system to assist children in camps, organised training workshops, mediated in quarrels among aid groups.

“Sometimes when NGOs intervene they fail to see things holistically,” Galappatti once said in a publication. “They do not realise that children are embedded in family, school or community networks.”

These pre-existing support systems are vital resources and should be sustained, he suggests.

 A catalyst

Galappatti and his colleagues made sure special needs were not overlooked. Women had to have private places, school exams should be postponed, orphans placed in the care of relatives and caregivers, the grieving given privacy when identifying their dead.

The Mangrove has since scaled back its operations in Batticaloa because of political violence and instability, but this did not mean a total retreat. The work that was begun could be replicated in other places.

Married and with a small child, Galappatti is now pursuing his doctorate in social anthropology and health at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His other foot is immersed in Sri Lanka.

He describes what he has gone through as “a cross-disciplinary journey.”

“Continuity must be externalised,” he muses. He speaks of “memory”—that it exists in other places. “Memory—we are each bearers of it.” What was begun would continue.

Galappatti is not keen, at the moment, on institutionalising what he and his colleagues had begun.

“I do not want to give in to the temptation to grow something big. This is not about buildings but about multiplying the roles we play. Don’t try to hold people together. Send them off”, he says.

He reflects and turns pensive. “When I encounter suffering it makes me feel terrible in a very fundamental way.”

And yet Galappatti, when asked, does not seem to have thought much about what to call himself technically. The word is hard to find. He laughs. Someone so involved and immersed in extreme situations is hard put finding a description of himself and what he does.

Finally, he says the word “catalyst.”