growing old in kalmunai

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62 years, sick, shaking with probably fever, unhcr provided temporary shelter even almost 4 years after the tsunami, because there is no money to rebuild the house. living on approx. 60 US$ a month which is not much with fuel prices comparable to europe. health care is provided for free, but that also means that not much can be provided for a poor man.

(through our project he got pipe water access. it is not much, for sure, but many don't have even this.)

being a tamil, he will not walk through the muslim parts of the city after dark (nor do the muslims go to tamil areas). he feels lucky if there is no further confrontation between those ethnic/religious groups as it has happened too many times in the past.

my own needs, fears and wishes look so surreal when confronted with this situation. fortunately my own abilities to make pictures fade away are not below average.
the age of 62 certainly feels different in the g8.

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Tsunami Traces II

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the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka more than 3.5 years ago. it's traces can still be seen in the faces of the people. that man to the right, probably 15 years younger than me, lives and works next to the place he lost his family, barely 50m away from the shoreline. conversation was difficult, so he silently offered me a glass of tea and we stood there closemouthed in a place where i was already short after tsunami, covered in the smell of decaying corpses under collapsed houses.

the west and south of sri lanka got rebuilt pretty fast and well, as this is where the singhalese majority leaves. the east with the muslims and tamils was always neglected and still is. or could you imagine a city of 100.000+ inhabitants not having a single loader and truck? hospitals not sporting a toilet for the men's ward? and still a number of tsunami affected families live in temporary shelters. as do the sometimes 180.000+ internally displaced persons (an excellent euphemism for war refugees) alone in this region. those war refugees get no compensation, in the camps they wait to be allowed returning to the shattered remainders of their villages after one or the other army was there. and racism shows its ugly face everywhere, making tamils fight muslims, tamils kill tamils, singalese fight tamils without end.

this photo on flickr.

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