Tsunami Appeal 

Sarangapalam 

Food Distribution Recount & Photos

It all started on Friday morning 28 January 2005, Shane, myself, our daughters, my Indian assistant and a friend headed off to Sarangapalam, our adopted village.

We arrived unannounced at 9am and walked through the village, it was obvious that the men were at a loss as to what to do with their day and the women were trying to keep hungry children pacified.

We had the village elder call a representative from each family. We wrote all their names down and gave each a numbered card. They were to hold the card until we returned and that would be their food ticket so to speak.

The villagers are very friendly and also realistic, they didn’t ask for a huge list of items as some villages have done, just for some help with purchasing new nets and repairing their boats. At this point the village have no idea what we have planned. We can’t give them advance notice because then word would leak out and we would be greeted next time with thousands of people and likely riots and stampedes.

While at the village I noticed that most of the ladies clothing was almost rags, threadbare and torn so on the way home I decided that we would purchase a sari for each lady.

So then it was home to pick up the rice, pack the trucks and purchase sari’s. Shane and I met the trucks at the rice seller’s and oversaw the packing of 25kg bags of rice, 100 bags in total, too easy.

Next was to get the trucks back to our house to load the dahl and oil (On Thursday we had prepacked this into 5kg bags for dahl and 3 litres for oil) onto the truck. Shane loaded the truck while my assistant Sheela and friend Sunitha and I went to the cloth wholesalers in the industrial part of town, called One Town. We quickly found the sari’s that we wanted, a good quality cotton sari that would be comfortable and easy for everyday wear. Getting 100 of them was a whole other story though, they only had about 20 in the tiny shop so we had to wait while the shop assistant went to their depot to get more, that took about an hour. Eventually the guy turned and we completed our deal and left with 4 large bundles of colourful sari’s.

We arrived back home to find the trucks fully loaded and all ready to leave early the next morning. The truck drivers were to spend the night in their trucks. So with everything organized we sent everyone else home with instructions to be back at 4.30am.

 Saturday morning the alarm went off very early, but we were all excited so rolled out of bed, even our daughters were up and dressed quickly.

We had arranged for Sheela, Sunitha, her brother Ramesh, my househelp Lakshmi & Ratna, and 2 security guards Daviah and Ramakrishna to all to be our house at 4.30am. Surprisingly for India (cause Indian time always means being late) everyone was on time so we were able to get away from the house just before 5am. The security guards rode one in each truck, Shane drove one vehicle and Ramesh drove the other. It took us about 3 hours to travel the 80km from our city to Sarangapalam village.

Sarangapalam is situated about 5km out of Machilipatnam and as soon as we left Machilipatnam the road became very rough. We arrived at Sarangapalam at about 8am. As soon as people saw us arriving with trucks their expressions of despair changed to smiles and everyone rushed to get the little cards that we had given them the day before.

Shane arranged the trucks side by side while Sunitha organized everyone with tickets into lines. Everyone else helped with crowd control and getting organized to distribute. I took photos!

We wanted to avoid problems that often occur with food distributions like other villages hearing word of the food and coming for a share, so we needed to get everything finished quickly.

We had card holders come one at a time to Sunitha & Ratna who took the ticket and crossed that name off our list. They then went to the first truck where Shane was handing out bags of rice and Kalista was handing out the bags of oil. From there they went to the second truck where Sheela was helping Demmi-Lea to hand out the Dahl and Lakshmi passed out the Sari’s. This process worked very well (although there was the odd complaint of sore arms from our young workers!) and we had distributed to all who had cards within 1 hour. We left the village at 9.30am.

We distributed 5kg dahl (lentils), 3 litres oil, 25kg rice and 1 sari to each family. This amount will feed each family for 3-4 weeks. They will supplement it with any vegetables they can find growing or purchase cheaply.

The villagers were very grateful to know there would be food to eat for the next few weeks and the ladies were so excited to have a new sari. The smiles on the faces of those men, women and children made all our efforts so worthwhile. It was another reminder to me that we have so much just by being lucky enough to be born in the ‘Lucky Country’. These people through no fault of their own were born to a small poor fishing village and will spend their lives working hard for their next meal. And now the Tsunami has made their lives so much harder.

Distributing food only takes care of the immediate problem though. They need to get their boats back in the water so they can earn a living again. Carpenters are working on repairing their boats, there are a couple that are already seaworthy and we are going again this Saturday to donate 150kg of fishing net to the village. With this fishing net they will be able to put the repaired boats back to use and start to once again earn income in the traditional ways of their village.

While we were there we noted that there is a couple of children who need medical treatment. A 12 yr old girl need surgery for correction of polio affected limbs and another 7 ye old girl has one eye that does not open. We will work in the coming months and see if we can get these problems corrected so the children can continue with their education. There was also a boy who lost his leg to polio, he is studying his Intermediate year (equivalent to Yr 11) at a good school in Machilipatnam and needs help with his school fees. It’s always exciting to find someone who is doing their best to break out of poverty by continuing their education. It is even more exciting to find a physically handicapped person doing it. It’s quite common here for people with disabilities to beg for their food rather than work for it so we are very keen to follow up with this boy’s college and see what we can do to help him.