Recovering from the Koslanda Landslide

In October 2014, landslides triggered by the monsoon rains claimed the lives of at least 12 people, while close to 200 people were reported missing. The deadly mudslide hit the Meeriyabedda tea plantation near the town of Haldummulla, about 200km (120 miles) east of the capital Colombo. Part of a mountainside crashed into the tea estate, burying some of the workers’ homes in 9m (30ft) of mud and debris.

The Foundation of Goodness was keen to do all that we could to help the devastated residents and survivors, and a team from FoG visited Koslanda in December 2014 to assess how we could best help this community who needed more than short te rm relief if they were to rebuild their lives successfully.

This first group was a team of counselors (made up of long term supporters of FoG and our Community Psycho-Social Unit, Dr. Shanthi Kumar and Malkanthi Hettiarachchi and Fazana Ibrahim from FoG) who started working with the affected families, in order to begin the healing process, in addition to carrying out a needs evaluation.

While initial plans had been to provide emergency disaster aid, it became clear that there was material help flowing in from other organizations, but what these people needed was a long term plan to help them get back on their feet, and improve their living conditions to a better level than before.

With this in mind, the Meeriyabedda families were included in the FoG Essential School Supplies Programme for the 2015 school year, and 87 children from the affected community received complete school supply packs to help them get through the new school year and jump back into their studies with everything they would need to excel.

This was followed up by a second round of counseling by the previous team, with the addition of trilingual counselor Ms. Monika Alfred, to follow up on the progress that the villagers were making, and we were happy to notice that many of them had made significant progress in dealing with their experiences.

In April, to coincide with the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, 91 families were presented with dry ration packs, sponsored by Give2Asia, who were also the donors for the 87 schools packs presented to the children earlier in the year.

Our partnership with Give2Asia is not new, as they have worked with us previously in developing the village of Neethipuram, in the North of Sri Lanka, as part of FoG’s effort to rebuild the lives of the northerners recovering from decades of conflict. Give2Asia funds helped up develop the Neethipuram preschool from a rough cement shed in to a beautiful place for the little village children to enjoy their first taste of education. They also helped us construct and handover some of the outdoor toilets built for the same village, which had no previous access to toilets.

We plan to continue this partnership with Give2Asia to help further develop the Koslanda Meeriyabedda community, with plans to give 50 scholarships to the children from the village for a period of one year, in the coming months.

Thank you Give2Asia, with your help, we will strive to help these people overcome disaster and rebuild their lives even better than before, just as we did in Seenigama and its surrounding region following the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.

06th July 2015