3.8.2008
By
Walter Jayawardhana
A
humanitarian worker who has helped the traumatized victims
of the Boxing Day Tsunami in Sri Lanka, Ananda Galappatti
has been awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for an emergent
leader, the Manila, Philippines based award committee
announced.
The
34 year-old London-born psychologist who specialized in
trauma worked in Batticaloa, a worst hit area of the tsunami
disaster to ease the trauma of the victims to be recognized
and to be included as one of the distinguished list of
the awardees who won the prestigious prize from Sri Lanka
like Dr. A.T.Ariyaratne, Rev. Father Mercelene Jayakody
and Dr. Ediriweera Sarathchandra. The award ceremony will
be held in Manila at the end of August.
The
citation of the award committee said, "No one is
ever truly prepared for a natural disaster. The humanitarian
interventions that follow are inevitably improvised and
hasty, as relief workers make urgent arrangements to provide
water, food, shelter, and sanitation and to relocate the
displaced survivors. Such was the case in Sri Lanka when
the great tsunami of 2004 left thousands of people dead
and tens of thousands homeless. But as Ananda Galappatti
knows, survivors of catastrophes like this one are also
burdened by shock and grief, and by fear, insecurity,
depression, rage and wrenching social problems—psychosocial
consequences of trauma similar to those of war. As a young
medical anthropologist, he is devoting himself to these
neglected needs.
"Ananda
Galappatti was born thirty-three years ago in London and
spent his early childhood in Sri Lanka. After attending
high school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, he studied psychology
at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
The
Sri Lanka to which he returned in 1996 was torn by bloody
civil conflicts of many years running. The following year,
he assisted Dr. Gameela Samarasinghe in a psychosocial
epidemiological survey of Sri Lanka's conflict zones.
This
revealed that 40 to 65 percent of those in the affected
areas displayed signs of post-traumatic stress linked
to war and violence. Yet, in all Sri Lanka there were
fewer than ten psychologists specializing in trauma. To
help fill this gap, Galappatti and Samarasinghe formed
the War Trauma & Psychosocial Support Program (PSP).
“Through
PSP's capacity building program, twenty-four-year-old
Galappatti trained twenty psychosocial workers to serve
the towns, villages, hospital, and refugee camps of Vavuniya,
a war-demoralized district six hours from Colombo, and
otherwise enabled the area's primitive psychosocial sector
with skill-building seminars, new intervention strategies,
and resources such as databases and procedure manuals.
In Vavuniya, Galappatti observed that psychological suffering
cannot be separated from the real-world circumstances
of its origins, including war itself and "deeply
rooted political divisions." His approach adapted
lessons from Western psychology to Sri Lankan conditions
and religious practices.
“Then,
on 26 December 2004, came the tsunami. Among the hardest
hit was Batticaloa on Sri Lanka's east coast, a district
like Vavuniya already traumatized by years of war. In
January 2005 Galappatti joined in founding The Mangrove,
a network of organizations and individuals in Batticaloa
dedicated to coordinating psychosocial aspects of the
relief effort.
"Not
wanting to be a "fly-in fly-out" expert, Galappatti
moved directly to Batticaloa. As The Mangrove's volunteer
coordinator, he lobbied incessantly for better psychosocial
services. He liaised with local, national, and international
agencies; convened meeting after meeting for aid workers
and psychosocial practitioners; and briefed newly-arrived
aid organizations. He set up a rapid assessment system
to assist children in camps, organized training workshops,
and mediated quarrels between aid organizations.
Constantly
networking, Galappatti spread word of "best practices"
and warned of harmful ones. Meanwhile, he and his collaborators
made countless humane interventions, insisting that women
in refugee camps have private places to bathe and sleep,
that anxious students have their examinations postponed,
that orphans be placed with relatives or familiar care-givers,
and that families be granted privacy when identifying
their dead.
“In
time, political violence and instability in Batticaloa
forced The Mangrove to scale back its work and Galappatti
embarked on his doctorate in Scotland. Today, with his
wife and small child, he is again living and working in
crisis-torn Batticaloa. Despite his Western education,
his colleagues say that he "thinks and acts as a
Sri Lankan," embracing his country's pluralism and
also its dangers. As a leader, they say, "he works
with the group as one of them" and "gently and
firmly gets them to think and act."
"In
electing Ananda Galappatti to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay
Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes
his spirited personal commitment to bring appropriate
and effective psychosocial services to survivors of war
and natural disaster in Sri Lanka."
Courtesy - Asian
Tribune