In 2017 the north and east of Sri Lanka have suffered the worst drought for 40 years.
For a community that lives off the land, the effects of prolonged drought can be devastating: as the water runs out, so do the prospects of survival.
In November a team made up of trustees from the UK Charity Care Sri Lanka (CSL), UK representatives of the Lanka Evangelical Fellowship of Churches (LEFC), doctors and other supporters from the UK and some Christian brothers from Switzerland flew out to see the challenges faced by the Christians in Sri Lanka. The aim was to visit some of the churches to give preaching, teaching and medical aid, assess the effects of the drought, provide support and encouragement, and look at the positive impact of donations to alleviate the drought.
Hunger and abuse
Against a backdrop of desperate poverty, many other challenges face these Christians.
In the central mountains, the home of the tea plantations, the drought has caused a number of different problems. Workers, mainly women, must collect 16kg of tea tips daily, working from 8am to 5pm, six days a week, to earn the £3.50 a day it takes to feed them. During the drought the tea bushes dried up and did not produce fresh tips to pick, so no pay and no money for food.
Because of this many women from the plantations, up to 30% in some areas, have been enticed away by foreign agents with the promise of money and a better life abroad, leaving their children to be looked after by neighbours who have little enough for themselves. On reaching their destination, these women find themselves no better than slaves in a strange country. The medical team treated many women who had returned with stories of abuse and rape, confirmed by the conditions for which they were seeking treatment. They were too ashamed or poor to seek help elsewhere. We found the same story in many other Tamil areas impacted by the drought.
Evicting whole families
The tea pickers’ families live in tied accommodation, often little more than ten feet square. The younger generation, perhaps the first since British colonial times, now has access to education; and with education comes the aspiration for better things. Plantation owners have found a way to keep successive generations enslaved by evicting whole families from their tiny homes if a younger family member seeks a job elsewhere.
The medical team were able to visit the remote community in the tea growing region of Haputale. A new well has been provided from donations made to CSL for the drought, for use by the whole community, but the team could not visit the well as there was such hostility towards Christians from the local Hindu population that they feared repercussions on the local believers if the visit went ahead.
In the Batticaloa region, challenges take a different form. This is the heart of cobra country. Locals fear to come to evening services at the little Thannamunai church as the snakes come out under cover of darkness. A short distance away is a Hindu temple to an idol of a five-headed cobra. In this area, if Hindus convert to Christianity they may find cobras put through the door of their home at night, to attack them in their sleep.
Lack of medicine
One of the main crops in the region is rice. Cobras prey on rats that live in the rice paddy fields. A paddy field worker suffering a snake bite will likely die, as he will not have money for medicine or the transport to get to hospital. This is another cause of many widows. The LEFC, through Pastor Harran, provides some of the church land for widows to grow crops, like peanuts or papaya, which they sell for a small income.
In the jungle, areas have been cleared so that the poor have somewhere to plant. It is a precarious existence; the government owns the land and can evict them at any time. Families have no money for new seed when their crops fail, so they rely on drought donations to buy more. The team visited a family who had been provided aid following the drought. The family lives on the land, protecting their crop until harvest.
Exploitation of the vulnerable
With no transport of their own, families are at the mercy of unscrupulous businessmen who arrive with trucks at harvest time and offer take-it-or-leave-it prices that have been driven down year on year. LEFC is investigating the possibility of setting up a Christian business to help the families transport their crop to market for a fair price.
