WTN Update: Sri Lanka Housing Projects, August 2006

In July David Crosweller of WTN made another trip to Sri Lanka and India to monitor the progress of house building, water and orphanage projects.

In Sri Lanka we have continued to build on pre-existing house plots and now have twenty four finished houses and six partly finished houses, giving us thirty in total, our original target. Working in countries like Sri Lanka you are always dogged by bureaucracy and corruption, but we have also discovered that the building process was slower than it could have been as we only had one set of roof shuttering, which meant only one house could be completed every fourteen days or so. The reason behind this was simply that shuttering was very expensive. We have changed the design of the next batch of houses to have an apex roof, which resolves the problem and falls in line with new Government regulations. We have built a number of the CAFOD funded houses on pre-existing plots. The house building has not moved as quickly as we would have liked over the past three months largely due to legal complications relating to the access road to the new site in Dickwela where we are ready to start building the next forty two houses. David’s primary task on this visit was to help resolve this issue, which we are pleased to confirm he did, and work will start in September.

David also had the opportunity to inspect another site that we have been offered near the lakes in Weligama. This site will give us space for another thirty houses. The owner is building a community centre and children’s home on the remainder of the land. The owner of this site also has another forty-acre site in Weligama that we are considering. We are not sure whether our long term future lies in building houses and whether we would like to make that level of commitment (it would mean several hundred houses and the basic cost is now £3,500). A report due to be released soon, says that Matara District had 2,500 houses destroyed and only 300 have been built. Compare this to Hambantota, which is the President’s Constituency, where they have more houses than people to fill them.

This highlights not only the difficulty of our decision but also the constant political corruption that is faced in Sri Lanka.

The tsunami and the current violence means that tourism has not picked up and this had left many families destitute – tourism was a major source of income. This situation is compounded by the inadequacies of the Government and means the day to day lives of many in this most delightful and friendly country are made even more difficult.

Our charity, with limited its resources, cannot possibly be all things to all people and at some point there has to be some rationalisation. We will not have to make the decision yet – the current house-building programme will take at least six months – but we are currently considering whether we raise further funds for house building or retain the charity’s focus on water, sanitation and livelihood projects.

Construction Work in Progress