One month on from Cyclone Ditwa: How communities in Sri Lanka are coping and rebuilding

You're listening to IFRC News, bringing you voices from the Red Cross and Red Closet Network. Hello and welcome to IFRC News, my name is India Robert Smiley. In today's episode, we turn our attention to Sri Lanka. One month after cycling, Dissuyer struck the island nation, causing the country's worst flight disaster in a decade. Slycoin Dissuyer unleashed torrential rains, severe flooding and destructive landslides across all 25 districts. And a month on, the country continues to grapple with the devastation. IFRC in the Sri Lankan Red Cross Society are providing life-saving assistance and supporting longer-term recovery across the country. And today I'm joined by Dallas Roy, IFRC Operations Manager based in Colombo, to share some insights from the ground. Dallas, firstly, thank you very much for joining me today. As I mentioned, Slycoin Dissuyer hit Sri Lanka in late November. So one month on or a little bit over that, can you first share a little bit about what daily life looks like now for those affected? Yeah, hi India and thanks for having me. Looking at this disaster as you've indicated, it was really widespread across most of the country. So pretty much the 25 districts of Sri Lanka were affected in some way. A few of those are now sort of, you know, life's gone a bit back to normal. But for the most affected, the houses are either damaged or destroyed due to flooding or landslides or both. And there's still tens of thousands of people that are forced to stay in evacuation centres in these temples, schools, other community buildings, or they're staying with family and friends. And these are often in really overcrowded, basic conditions where people don't have a lot of privacy or comfort. And in particular for the most vulnerable, they've lost their livelihoods and their income and their requiring daily support for all of the basic essentials of life, including food, water and shelter. I mean, it's clear that the devastation, as he says, really felt right across the country is still what kind of support a team is providing on the ground today and how is IFC supporting this work? Yeah, so from Sri Lanka Red Cross, you know, they have a network of branches across those 25 districts and they've mobilized over 400 volunteers as well as staff from branches and headquarters. They've been distributing essential household items, hygiene items, bedding items, particularly to the evacuation centres where people are staying. They've also been conducting first aid support and basic medical support to nearly 30,000 people so far. From IFC side of things, we've deployed a number of what we call surge personnel to provide technical support to Sri Lanka Red Cross and their operation, such as for communications, conducting assessments, shelter coordination, information management, planning, monitoring and evaluation and reporting. And then there's the lights for myself as operations manager and I've come from New Zealand Red Cross. And so you're based in Colombia at the moment. I imagine you're speaking to these people who are on the ground, these volunteers and staff members. What are the most urgent needs you're seeing at this stage of the response? Yeah, I mean, you know, with such a large impact, the ongoing needs are really significant. Particularly for those people, as I've said, that are staying in the evacuation centres or others that are not able to return to their own homes either because they're damaged or the area is still too unsafe to go back to due to the ongoing monsoon season, particularly in the northeast and the risk of landslides and through the flooding. Even at the moment, there's about three districts that are under a red weather warning over the next few days and they're expecting further flooding again. You know, so these types of things just sort of compound the disaster and make it more difficult to go from response to recovery. But from the ongoing urgent needs, so Sri Lanka Red Cross has just completed with our support a assessment over 20 of the 25 districts of the entire country. And this was to really talk to the affected people and understand directly from them what the most urgent needs are. And this identified that it is the loss of livelihood and income and the damage or destruction of their houses that are the most critical, along with things such as access to essential services, provision of clean water and ongoing health needs. It's great that we can conduct that sort of question so we can actually get a real sense of what those needs are on the ground. I think you mentioned this before, Dallas, but IFRC's law launched an emergency appeal of 12 million Swiss ranks to support nearly 600,000 people cope with this crisis. Can you tell me a bit about sort of what will this funding enable over the coming months in years for people on the ground? Yeah, so as I said, IFRC launched an emergency appeal in early December and recently we increased that funding request and funding ask to 12 million Swiss ranks due to the large scale of the disaster and the ongoing needs and through assessment and understanding the specific needs and how many people still need support. So building up to that hopefully if we get full funding to be able to support up to 600,000 people, Sri Lanka Red Cross, they continue to respond and support those daily needs, but they will also focus a lot on to cash support to help people with their daily needs and then also to support rebuilding their livelihoods. They're also doing things such as community cleanup campaigns. They did a big one last Sunday across 20, in fact all of the districts in Sri Lanka, they mobilized again hundreds of volunteers from all of the branches and then people from the communities also joined in to clean up their own communities. Those will continue. They're also supporting the cleaning of 10,000 wells, both for households and communities and they'll support skilled children with education kits, so bags, books, pens, pencils, rubbers, etc. And also child friendly spaces in some of the evacuation centres and psycho social support to the most vulnerable and affected and particularly for children. That's a great sort of range of the response and also having those statistics is really helpful to understand the impacts on what we plan to deliver. I know that this disaster in particular has really struck a country already facing complex socioeconomic hardship as well as climate risks. How and wondering how is IFRC helping communities not just recover, like you just mentioned, but also better prepare in the future for future shocks and future disasters like this? Yeah, well, as you say, this disaster has really compounded a situation where large elements of Sri Lanka were already under severe economic instability and food insecurity. The flooding and landslides from cyclone did just made that so much worse. So IFRC supporting Sri Lanka Red Cross with this emergency appeal and their response and recovery activities. But keeping in mind that this is the largest disaster to impact Sri Lanka since the tsunami in 2004. So Sri Lanka Red Cross will continue to support the most vulnerable and the most affected people and families and communities, not just through the next two years of this emergency appeal until the end of 2027, but they continue to support through their volunteers and branches across the entire country as they always do. But as part of the operation, they'll also support into things that we call disaster risk reduction and resilience and helping to support communities and people to be better prepared to have early warning systems that can help them evacuate early and things like that so that in the future when another event may occur, as we know it's likely to do, even through this period of the next two years, we've got multiple monsoon seasons because they've been in the same situation. So they have two different seasons, one for the sort of the north and one for the south. So there's always an expectation of something that could impact this country within the period that we're already supporting and responding. And we just have to try to prepare for that and support people in the best way we can to be ready as they can. Well Dallas, thank you so much for joining me today. It sounds like you and the team are incredibly busy right across the country. I really appreciate you making the time. Thanks for joining me and also thank you to the remarkable efforts really of Sri Lanka Red Cross Society and IFRC staff and volunteers who are on the ground and who have been on the ground since the beginning of this cyclone response. Thank you for joining me and thank you everyone for listening to IFRC News. You can join us again next time for more voices and stories from across the IFRC network.