Most tsunami victims still homeless: US survey

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) – Nearly a year after the Indian Ocean
tsunami, almost all of the aid recipients in villages hit by
the waves are still living in temporary shelters or camps,
according to a survey released on Tuesday.

The nonprofit Fritz Institute, a San Francisco group that
provides logistic expertise to relief organizations, surveyed a
representative sample of 2,300 people in villages hit hard by
the tsunami in India, Sri Lanka and the Northern Sumatra region
of Indonesia.

In Indonesia, 100 percent of the respondents still lived in
camps or temporary shelters run by the government or by aid
groups, as did 92 percent in India and 78 percent in Sri Lanka,
the survey found.

Some had moved from tents into makeshift shelters with
thatched roofs or open sides, while others were staying with
relatives but “almost nobody in our survey was in permanent
shelter,” said Dr. Anisya Thomas, the institute’s managing
director, who oversaw the survey.

Rebuilding was slowed by continued flooding in India and by
building-code and land-allocation issues in all three nations,
she said.

“These are densely populated countries, so there’s not a
lot of discretionary land to give away. A lot of people on the
coast don’t want to move deep inside,” Thomas said.

“And not everybody that was affected by the tsunami was in
permanent shelter before the tsunami. The tsunami affected a
lot of poor people.”

A magnitude 9.15 earthquake that hit on December 26 last
year triggered the catastrophic tsunami that left up to 232,000
people dead or missing and wiped out coastal communities in a
dozen Indian Ocean nations.

GLOBAL RELIEF EFFORT

The respondents were interviewed in September and October
in their native languages in 93 Indian villages, 98 Sri Lankan
villages and five hard-hit areas in Northern Sumatra.

The survey showed that the massive global relief effort
succeeded in delivering aid to millions of people affected by
the tsunami, but that many survivors lost their livelihoods and
have not regained their financial footing.

Eighty-three percent of respondents in Indonesia had seen
their income drop by more than 50 percent, as did 59 percent in
Sri Lanka and 47 percent in India.

Many families had lost their primary wage earners. Others
were fishermen who lost their boats or people whose jobs
depended indirectly on the fishing trade, Thomas said.

“Fishing was a core occupation that supported a lot of
allied occupations in those communities,” she said.

A lot of those who lost their jobs because of the tsunami
now live on government assistance or work for the government on
rebuilding projects, while others scrounge for work as day
laborers but earn less than they did before the tsunami, she
said.

The Fritz Institute plans to conduct similar surveys among
those affected by Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast, to
find ways to deliver humanitarian aid more effectively after
catastrophes.

“People can’t expect that one year later everything is back
to normal because it’s not. We all have a lot to learn from
this recovery process,” Thomas said.