WITNESS-Rolling up my sleeves after the tsunami

By John Chalmers

KADAPAKKAM, India, Feb 15 (Reuters) - A laptop, notebook and pens are my usual travelling tools. I never expected to be packing a hard hat, steel-capped boots and a pile of dust masks.

But they were on the "must bring" list for 20 Reuters employees who had volunteered to spend a week building houses for a community devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Buying a hard hat and protective goggles was the first challenge, even in shopaholic Singapore. It was a relief that the list had trowel, mason's spoon, hammer and spirit level down as optional.

I have covered natural disasters, flying in within hours of earthquakes and storms to feed that voracious demand for news.

The scenes were often brutal. There was the skeletal dog gnawing on a human corpse after the 2001 earthquake in western India, and the grief-crumpled man on Algeria's coast in 2003 who thought to offer me tea even as rescuers dug for his daughter's body.

But journalists rarely stay more than a week or 10 days covering such catastrophes before the media spotlight shifts to the next big story: the painful years spent rebuilding shattered lives and communities go largely unreported.

Which is what drew me, with all my building gear, to the crowded coast of Tamil Nadu state in India.

More than 7,000 people were killed here and nearly 140,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by the tsunami's giant waves on Dec. 26, 2004.

Fisherman Arumugam (one word) of Kadapakkam village was out at sea that day. His boat capsized with the force of the second wave and the 19-year-old swam for an hour to reach the shore, where he clung to the top of a palm tree and waited to be rescued.

His neighbour, Gopal Samy, 60, still lies awake at night terrified that another wall of water will come charging through the front of his home.

The waters swept away Samy's wife. She survived but, pointing to an old woman on a dirt track peeling prawns, he says her hair turned white and she no longer speaks.

FAR TO GO

Eighty families lost their homes in Kadapakkam. Now the village is moving into 182 houses being built by the charity Habitat for Humanity beside a palm-fringed backwater, safe from the seafront and from any future tsunamis.

There, in searing heat, we dug foundations and built walls for some of the last 20 houses.

But why has it taken two years to get the villagers to safety?

For all the hype about the rise of tech-savvy India Inc., village India still bumbles along.

Many fishing villages have been moved inland, losing their only means of income. The community leaders of one admitted recently that about 100 people had sold their kidneys since the tsunami, some for less than $1,000, to make ends meet.

A report by the Housing and Land Rights Network group was scathing of the construction efforts so far, saying that cramped bathing spaces, tiny kitchens and a lack of privacy for women had only compounded the trauma of survivors.

It also lashed the Tamil Nadu government for "ineffective" monitoring of voluntary agencies that have built houses without consulting local people on traditional living habits.

Were we making the same mistakes in Kadapakkam, building replica boxes that were too small for India's typical extended family, and laying them out in a grid pattern you would never find in a traditional village?

And what must the locals have thought about a band of sunblock-larded, First-World executives fumbling with plumb-bobs and building wavy walls at one-fifth the pace they could work?

The villagers seemed genuinely excited about their new homes and, to be fair to Habitat for Humanity, the houses have been designed to take an extension or a second floor later.

Back in my air-conditioned Singapore home, I still had doubts about how much practical help we had provided.

But we had brought something more valuable than the laying of a few thousand bricks and more measurable than any anguished news report from the scene of a disaster: money.

Our group and two others to follow had raised some $80,000 in sponsorship, enough to pay for more than 20 homes.

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