Students Respond to Tsunami

ALTHOUGH HELAINE DANIELS, director of the Kennedy School’s MPP program, traveled to Sri Lanka to see students who spent their summer helping people recover from disaster, she learned how much the effort meant when a woman living in a transitional camp told her: “We are so glad you came. We are so glad that you have taken an interest in us.”

“It brought me to tears,” Daniels said. “It also captured the experience that both my students and I had.”

The journey for representatives of the Kennedy School began with a single e-mail. Indunil Ranaviraja, now a second-year MPP student, sent a message to Daniels after she learned in December 2004 that a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that would eventually claim 200,000 lives in 13 countries had devastated her homeland of Sri Lanka. The e-mail was a call to action that the school administration answered.

As part of its summer internship activities, the school donated $25,000 to fund student internships with local organizations involved in relief and rehabilitation efforts in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Ranaviraja and 12 other Kennedy School students worked in the affected region over the summer to aid ongoing recovery efforts.

Before the students embarked on their internships, Daniels directed the school response prior to her own visit to Sri Lanka. In addition, Jay Rosengard, a lecturer in public policy with experience in international development, traveled to both Indonesia and Sri Lanka before the students arrived to meet with the heads of agencies for which the students would work.

At the start, Ranaviraja didn’t anticipate such a hands-on response. She simply wanted to get a phone call through to Sri Lanka to speak with her family after learning about the scope of the tsunami’s destruction. When she was able to reach them, she learned her family was safe but the country was completely unprepared for the disaster, she said. She also learned that her father, a civil servant, was helping to manage the emergency response in Sri Lanka.

Ranaviraja, still in Cambridge, decided to research local organizations. She wanted to let people know what efforts were worth supporting in addition to the better-known efforts like the Red Cross. She was also worried about what would happen after the immediate flurry of contributions and attention to the tragedy.

“I started thinking that I would be interested in going to Sri Lanka over the summer, and I knew others would be.” she said.

Four students also traveled to Indonesia, including Ari Perdana MPA/ID 2006, a native of the country. (His family wasn’t directly affected by the tsunami.) He worked in the World Bank office in Banda Aceh, which opened in February to manage recovery projects and coordinate a trust fund from multiple donor countries.

“I went there with some emotional attachment to the situation. But I also had previous knowledge about the government and the structure of the country,” said Perdana who plans to return to his home country after earning his MPA/ID. “By working directly in the field, I could have some feeling about the magnitude of the devastation that took place there.”

Perdana assisted in drafting the bank’s six-month report and made site visits to prepare bank presentations to local officials. He heard frustration from displaced people uncertain how long they would reside in transitional camps. Although he sympathized with their plight, Perdana said the tsunami caused long-term problems difficult for the local government to handle.

“This is a full-scale reconstruction effort,” he said. “It’s not as easy as saying, ‘There are 1,000 people. Let’s build 1,000 houses,’ because you need special planning.”

Working in Sri Lanka on transitional issues with the Task Force for Relief, the government-sponsored umbrella group that coordinates relief and rescue, Ranaviraja also visited people displaced by the tsunami, many of whom had moved from tents to temporary housing. She did needs assessments and talked to government officials about administering a cash grant program.

“I was impressed with the progress that had been made. We didn’t have anyone dying of disease or malnutrition and the law-and-order situation was pretty good,” she said. “Sri Lanka is definitely having more trouble with the longer term rehabilitation issues.”

For instance, families are still a long way from securing permanent housing and gaining selfsufficiency, she said. The country’s limited resources have hampered relief efforts. Economic development efforts, she said, would help solve many problems there.

Ranaviraja, who came to the United States when she was 11, hopes to return to her home country someday to help bring about reforms in the public sector there. She has kept in touch with the other students who went to Sri Lanka and credits them for their effort to help a country torn by longstanding civil strife in addition to the tsunami.

“All in all, as a group, we feel we’ve been able to help the organizations,” said Ranaviraja. “Whatever they’ve asked from us, we feel like we’ve been able to deliver.”

According to Daniels, that’s exactly what one would expect from Kennedy School students.

“The students are here because they want to use their skills to make this world a better place,” she said. “Our students truly believe they can make a difference, and that’s what makes the school a pleasant place to be.”

For more information on the tsunami relief efforts, go to www.ksg.harvard.edu/relief/