Cleanup Precedes Former Presidents

Talk about a Potemkin village. In the two months since the tsunami, there's been no outward evidence of USAID relief operations in Weligama. The leading players in the relief effort here have been foreign and local businessmen, assisted by the Belgian army and teams of firefighters from Germany.

That changed over the weekend when a motorcade pulled up in the center of the town. Dozens of Sri Lankan "volunteers" dressed in USAID caps jumped out of a truck and began frantically clearing up rubble, carting it away in wheelbarrows and dumping it on the side of the road. They started at Sujith's house in Sathniwasapura and moved out from there.

The reason for all this frenetic activity became clear to me only on Monday when former U.S. presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton arrived in Weligama as part of a whirlwind tour of tsunami-affected areas in southern Sri Lanka. The cleanup operation had two objectives: One, tidying the place up before the arrival of the ex-presidents and two, demonstrating a USAID presence in Weligama just in time for the big visit.

Although the rubble-clearers described themselves as "volunteers," I later learned they were earning around $3 a day as part of a cash-for-work program funded by USAID. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Such programs are a reasonably effective way of funnelling aid money into the local economy.

Teams of "disaster tourists" from Sweden and Switzerland followed in the wake of USAID people, handing out kitchen supplies, children's games, and mosquito nets. As far as I could tell, there was little method or logic to the distribution system. Some people who had lost their homes received nothing at all, while young thugs who were unaffected by the tsunami walked off with dozens of pots and pans, which will probably end up in local markets.

After handing out the booty, the disaster tourists jumped back into their air-conditioned bus and drove off to the next village.

-- Michael Dobbs

By washingtonpost.com |  February 22, 2005; 5:00 AM ET  | Category:  Michael Dobbs
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