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• The Rebuilding Dehiwela project

• Volunteer diaries

About the Rebuilding Dehiwela project

After the Asian Tsunami of 2004, four volunteers from Coventry City Council went out to Dehiwela to help with the Rebuilding Dehiwela project, which was run in partnership with Coventry-based charity Global Care.

Volunteer diaries

Read their volunteer diaries to find out more about their experiences in Dehiwela.

Global Care's role in Dehiwela

Coventry-based charity Global Care received £100,000 in just ten days, and has since received over £400,000. Global Care has focused all its efforts on the Dehiwela beach slum, near Colombo, Sri Lanka, where it worked for seven years before the tsunami, providing education and health care.

How the money was spent:

Homes

Relief:

• temporary homes were found for the 1,541 families who lost everything.
• a camp was set up in disused school housing 200 people - providing water tanks, mats, bedding, mosquito nets, cooking equipment, food and medical attention.
• six months rent was paid for families who found rented accommodation.

Reconstruction:

Permanent housing – the disaster brought a fantastic opportunity to build something far better than the slum destroyed by the tsunami. Global Care paid architects to draw up plans and two pieces of land were donated by the Sri Lankan government. Global Care's partners bought a third site.

A three-storey blocks of two-bedroom apartments was built on two sites (almost 500 homes), and 33 family homes on the third. These are not luxury homes – but good quality, sustainable housing that will not be washed away in any future tsunami.

Community facilities

Global Care built small community halls at each housing development, with clinic and crèche activity, a welfare visitor and teacher.

Livelihoods

Global Care worked with its partners to re-equip the people of Dehiwela to make a living, providing sea-diving equipment, farming tools, fishing equipment, vegetable carts and stocks of vegetables and incense. New sewing machines were bought for vocational training, and micro-enterprise development loans and community self-help schemes have been re-launched.