2.Women’s collective group; An organization committed to the cause of women, very actively involved in the relief and rehabilitation efforts in Kancheepuram district & in the villages/coastal areas of Kanyakumari.

3.AID India; well known national organization involved in massive relief operations in Nagapattinam & Cuddulore districts.

4.CEAD; A NGO certified by GIVE Foundation. We reached about 4000 people in Andhra Pradesh through this organization in an area where hardly any NGO is involved (A detailed report form the organisaton is enclosed). We are also looking at giving long term support for restoration of livelihood and schools.

5.Videyal Trusts long term partner for VASTRADAAN, Known for its work in the Kanyakumari region.

6. We have also started a small unit in our long term partner Ashoka Fellow Elango Rangaswamy’s well known model village Kuthambakam. Here we will be making new shirts skirts, uniforms for schools (stitched from large quantity of new donated fabric) for the school children in the effected areas.

Mid Term Plan
This is the second and the most crucial and important stage. Unfortunately by this time most of the relief agencies either go back or shift their prime focus to rehabilitation.. At this time it’s crucial to ensure basic material to all the families and filling up the gaps in terms of demand v/s supply and gaps created because of parallel distributions amidst lot of genuine problems, greed & infighting among people.

Scenario:
•In some areas the situation is bad in terms of so many agencies working together for the same people and in some areas people are still waiting for them. Parts of Andhra Pradesh are a clear example, where very few agencies are working despite the heavy losses, as the death toll was limited it didn’t get much media and public attention.

• Very few people have got temporary shelters keeping in view the scale of the problem and devastation. Most remain homeless, sleeping outside or trying to remain with someone. They still have no source of earnings as boats, nets, shops are still to be rebuilt.

•As all the big groups and government shift focus to rehabilitation from relief, there are very few sporadic relief activities and people do not have any access to basic relief material like dry ration etc. in many areas.

•As the media attention fades the disaster is fading out of the mind of people and in the cities hardly any collections are happening.

In my travels and meeting with people I find hundreds of cases which can be solved easily, where a major impact can be made through simple steps but which often get left out as we all are busy in larger issues.

It becomes important to continue support for relief material to people till the time they get their employment tools back and get back to work to earn their own livelihood.

Making a resource out of waste cloth in Tamil Nadu

At a time when lots of unwanted clothes collected from the cities is lying waste in Tamil Nadu, Goonj has taken up the challenge of using this material as a resource for the victims of Tsunami. We offered to take all this cloth, sort it, repair it and pass on the reusable cloth to the needy people and turn the rest of the cloth into school bags, school mats etc for the schools in the Tsunami affected areas. The Relief department of the Tamil Nadu government has agreed in principal to our proposal.

Schools – a major focus area

Another effected area is schools- the general perception is that most schools are not affected. Although there isn’t much structural damage but the fact remains that all the students are badly affected. Most of them have lost their family members, teachers, classmates apart from loosing their valuable notes, notebook, stationery etc.

A 9th class girl student in Nambiar Nagar village who was very good in studies and desperately want to become a teacher but now her father is forcing her to leave studies because he can not afford her fee which is as little as Rs. 50/-

A 9th class boy will be leaving studies because his father wants him to join in fishing to recover the losses.

We found schools where the equations are- One room- 2 teachers- 5 classes- black board on all four walls and 200 children without uniform, bags, notebooks and pencils.

Apart from a major psychological trauma many children are forced to leave schools as in some case they have to support their families financially so they have to look for some earning opportunities and in some cases, parents are asking them to leave school for the reasons like- taking care of siblings as the have lost their mother, helping father in repairing of boat or in rebuilding shelter.

GOONJ..right from the beginning made an appeal for school material and has already been sending it to many organizations and schools. We are all set to implement our major programme - SCHOOL to SCHOOL (please refer www.changemakers.net for more details of this programme) in this area for the coming years.

We consider it a major GAP FILLING exercise which is our prime target in the coming months. We need patience and understanding of our volunteers, supports and donors and a lot of resources in long term to do it effectively.

We are really making our best efforts to look for individuals, small groups who are suffering just because some small gaps are there.

Long Term Plan

With our past experience in other disasters and keeping in view the ground realities we have planned long term relief work. We are thankful to people who understand this approach and are ready to support later with the material which will certainly help us to run the campaign.

•With reliable and effective distribution network GOONJ.. is reaching to the remotest parts of various effected areas and trying to divert all surplus like general clothes to various other states through its ongoing nationwide movement- VASTRADAAN.

•Goonj has always talked about Disaster preparedness, this disaster is a moot point around how we were, with our limited resources, able to reach people quickly only because our systems were in place. We want to be more organized and effective in material collection for which we want to have a Disaster Cell in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, to begin with.

•Time and time again response from the masses around disasters has highlighted the need for better awareness and information. This is an area where we would like to initiate a nation wide awareness campaign.

•We will be initiating long term tie ups with the schools in the affected areas under the broad aegis of our nationwide School to School programme. Our emphasis will be on initiating activity centres in these schools for positive development of the traumatized children. We already have very good response from schools in Delhi and Mumbai who want to participate in the effort.

•Working towards a more broad based development effort we will in the next phase start our cloth for work programme in partnership with local NGO’s and panchayats.

Long Term Learning

•Fortunately for Goonj.. because we have been working in this area for some time now, our work in this disaster showed good results. Individuals, grass root organisations, corporates, big social sector bodies like CAF, Give Foundation showed their faith in our credibility by wanting to work through us. There have been various interactions, opportunities and ideas around getting into long term rehabilitation and rebuilding but our experience has taught us we should stick to our mission. That we should not get into traditional work of providing houses, boats and nets. These are most essential issues but there are agencies at the ground level which are doing a very good job of it. Our role lies in being able to connect both ends of the chain and there is still a long way to go.

•This disaster like many others in the past was a reminder of what a big difference can be made if we (the NGO’s, corporates, institutions, media, and individual donating material) pay a little bit of attention to the needs of the beneficiaries. Their emotional need to be treated with dignity, their need for long term support, their basic needs like undergarments, cooking vessels, sanitary napkins for women. Goonj.. wants to be able to make that difference and that’s why we are always particular that no salwar should be sent without a tie string, shoe laces should be tied together so that the pairs don’t get mixed up, a sari should always be given with a blouse and a petticoat.

•There has been a huge response from volunteers, donors and supporters. This support needs to continue for a much longer time. We will need volunteers to work on issues over at least a year. Gearing ourselves up for working over such a long time is critical. It is important not to fizzle out at this stage. It is important to understand our overall strategy and to go along with it. The pressure to see immediate results should not cloud the need to work slowly but steadily.

•There are lots of people whose houses are not destroyed in the affected towns and Tsunami didn’t physically enter their homes but they are finding it tough to survive because their livelihood depended on the fishing industry. So even though they are not from the fishing community they are as badly hit BUT unfortunately relief means fisherman community ONLY in general perception. Lakhs of people who were working as labour for loading and unloading fish boxes, were involved in marketing, or used to sell it from the shops or in Haats don’t get the attention they deserve.

•We strongly feel that in the crowd of plenty of relief and rehabilitation agencies GOONJ.. has to play a role of looking for gap areas which are normally overlooked individual cases which get left behind in big operations. We have to identify such cases and try and find solutions for them. In our limited resources we might end up solving just a few hundred cases but the fact remains even that is neither a small number nor is it insignificant work.