Friends in Need

Friends in Need began as a tsunami disaster-relief project in Sri Lanka, but has built on its successes in community capacity building and development to focus on peacebuilding work.

Description

The project started as an  emergency relief project in response to the 2005 tsunami, and grew to promote community peacebuilding initiatives and ownership for development. The communities decided to open four CPBR offices in their respective villages and currently 160 volunteers are working in them, conducting development and peace building activities.

All the people living in the particular four tsunami- and war-affected villages are involved in the project. Three of the four villages are in the north and one is in the south of the country. These four villages are multi-ethnic but each has a dominant ethnic and religious group: Ninthavur - Muslim; Periyaneelavanei and Thirukkovil - Tamil/Hindu;  Madihe - Sinhala/Buddhist. 

Aims / Objectives

Through this initiative, CPBR aims to promote inter-ethnic understanding and cooperation, and to raise awareness on the conflict and positive conflict transformation methods. By responding to the natural disaster of the tsunami, CPBR hopes to contribute to the transformation of the disaster of war. It also aims to mobilise and strengthen the communities to form powerful civil society groups that stand for a political solution to the ethnic conflict, taking into account the fears and aspirations of all ethnicities.

CPBR also aims to establish a basis for the university community to practically apply the knowledge they have gained through CPBR programmes, and to implement strategies which combine peace with development, technology and art as conflict transformation methods. This will contribute to the conflict transformation of the community and also will train a future generation of Sri Lankan leaders in both the practical and academic aspects of conflict transformation.

How it is Articulated

During the initial tsunami relief phase, four five-day workshops were conducted for 160 selected young people from four tsunami-affected villages in the north and south. Following this a series of workshops on psychosocial healing using art, drama and music was conducted. The capacity building component involved training the selected youth on how to mobilise and lead their communities to recover from the tsunami disaster. This included designing development projects and training in how to write project proposals for funding agencies. The training encouraged the participants to take an active role in the development of their own areas.

Follow-up training was conducted a year later, further raising awareness of the ethnic conflict, building the young leaders' conflcit transformation capacity and encouraging the establishment of peacebuilding elements in their projects. Their development and peacebuilding work in their communities is ongoing.

Achievements / Learning Points

The grassroots communities are more genuinely committed to the peace process than all other groups CPBR has worked with so far, they are very creative and have a lot of potential, determination and commitment. They need only the support and guidance to set them along a path. Therefore CPBR believes that working directly with people from different ethnicities who live in rural areas can be especially productive in creating social harmony. 

Social service organisations often open regional offices to support the grassroots community living in conflict areas, and staff those offices with professionals from their existing offices. This mechanism does not encourage the development of local human resources, but rather increases dependency. Developing the human resources in the community as part of the process of building up the infrastructure is a better strategy. 

And CPBR has succeeded in empowering people from these villages to form groups and carry out the development work needed for their villages by themselves. Currently they are earning their own livelihoods and running small industries using material from their area, and are building roads and houses for the tsunami-affected communities in their areas with the assistance of donor organisations. This is a major improvement on their previous dejected, victimised outlook following the tsunami. 

Conflict-related work as conducted at present in Sri Lanka appears very complicated. As a result, people see as it as operating on a distant level and it is difficult for them to understand. It would be beneficial to adapt the concepts to the local level at which they work and to incorporate and draw from the culture and context of the participants.

Geographical Area of Operation

Eastern and southern provinces of the country.

Funding resources

Mercy Corps, USAID, Peace Direct, Care, FORUT.

Stories

A year and a half after the initiation of Friends in Need, the communities with which CPBR works initiated peacebuilding activities that they themselves designed, organised and implemented independent of any external assistance. The children’s clubs that were initiated by CPBR volunteers in Thirukkovil, which is a Tamil/Hindu village in the midst of the war zone,travelled to Mathara, a dominantly Sinhala/Buddhist area. They were making a peace journey to perform a ‘Dansela’, a special form of almsgiving in which people collect money from the houses in the village and set up free food stalls along the road for passers-by. The Dansela took place on the 13th-15th June 2006, and involved distinctly Tamil food and cultural activities. The children in the Tamil village initiated this activity along with the other two Tamil and Muslim villages with which CPBR works in eastern Sri Lanka, asking their own communities to donate the necessary food items and money to make this idea a reality. They discussed this idea with their fellow children’s clubs and CPBR volunteers in Matara, and were welcomed warm-heartedly. The people in Matara are going to host the group in their homes and provide them with all necessary assistance to make this a success.

This ‘Dansela’ is held to celebrate the Buddhist festival ‘Poson’ held in June to commemorate the arrival of Buddhism to the country. This was the unique appeal of the project: a group of Tamil and Muslim children and their communities presenting a gift from their culture to the Sinhalese children and their community, to celebrate a Sinhala/Buddhist festival.

Associated Organisations

CBPR Colombo and the CPBR offices in the four villages (Thirukkovil, Periyaneelavanai, Ninthavur and Mathara) formed with the initiation of the respective communities.