Sri Lanka Is Grateful, But What to Do With the Ski Parkas?

--- Well-Meaning
Donors Send Heaps of Useless Stuff; Pajama Tops, No Bottoms
By Patrick Barta and Eric Bellman
1138 words
3 February 2005
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
GALLE, Sri Lanka -- The grateful people of Sri Lanka would like to make a humble
request to all those who have offered succor to its devastated tsunami victims: Please, no
more ski jackets, moisturizing gel or Viagra.
The recent outpouring of tsunami support has brought with it a mountain of unusable
stuff from the Western world. That includes cozy winter hats, Arctic-weather tents,
cologne and thong underwear. Dubbed "frustrated cargo" by aid workers -- because it
often has nowhere to go -- these misfit items are gathering dust in warehouses and
creating major headaches for relief workers in the field.
Mounds of donated clothes litter the coastal highway south of Colombo. Bottled water
from European mountain streams is flowing freely, raising concern about empties
littering the jungle. Medicines that are no longer needed, such as morphine, are feared to
be loose in the country.
Some people are putting items of no apparent local value to creative use. Impakt Aid, a
Sri Lankan group, cites two dozen goose-down jackets it recently received from a
European relief agency. The group forwarded the coats to a refugee camp. There, they
were used to wrap babies without diapers.
"People are just bringing anything and everything," says Melanie Kanaka, a World Bank
administrator who is helping coordinate aid in the battered town of Galle. "We don't have
the resources in this country to sort it all out."
Many vital needs still aren't being met, even as marginal donations pile up. Government
figures record the arrival of 30,000 sheets, but only 100 mattresses. Colombo's main
airport says it received 5,000 pajama tops from Qantas Airways, but no bottoms to go
with them. The airline won't comment beyond saying that it sent a planeload of supplies
to Sri Lanka, primarily medical supplies. Many of the country's more than 300 refugee
camps face critical shortages of cough syrup and infection-fighting creams -- even though
there are plenty of skimpy undergarments.
Many aid workers don't know where all the useless handouts are coming from, or whom
they're intended for. Although most aid that arrives is earmarked for specific relief
agencies, such as the Red Cross, some shipments are addressed simply to "The People of
Sri Lanka" and have no return address.
In other cases, the aid arrives unsolicited on the doorsteps of local charities, courtesy of
foreign relief providers they have never heard of. Or, it wanders into the country in the
suitcases of well-meaning tourists who then strike out on their own for the tsunami zone.
Western clothes are a particular nuisance. Although the nation's coastal regions have an
average temperature of about 80 degrees and a preference for modest dress, aid groups
are receiving sweaters and women's dress shoes. Much of the clothing arrives used and in
bad condition. That is a major problem, aid workers say, because some Sri Lankans fear
used clothing has been taken from dead bodies.
As a result, discard piles are popping up everywhere -- including the second-floor
hallway of Galle's government district office. One day recently, as officials processed aid
requests, the moldy heap attracted just a handful of skeptical browsers.
One elderly woman pronounced the clothes "unsuitable" because they weren't appropriate
for her age. The items included a heavy woven baby hat, a mustard-colored dress shirt
and a leopard-print dress.
At the Kattugoda Jummah mosque near Galle, meanwhile, children spent their free time
last week doing back flips and somersaults over a knee-deep bed of hand-me-downs. The
children tied a shawl around a rafter so they could swing around in the air before
dropping onto the soiled laundry below. "Clothes are really good to play in," said 10-
year-old Mohamad Afral as he jumped around on the pile.
Kattugoda Jummah's adults are eager to unload all the stuff cluttering up the mosque. As
laborers carted off some of the garments in a wheelbarrow, one of the mosque's leaders,
Mohamad Nizam, fished a crusty pillowcase from the pile and frowned. "This is useless,"
said Mr. Nizam, who says he is more concerned about the mosque's dwindling supply of
food.
Although essential in the early days of the relief effort, bottled water is now proving to be
more trouble than it's worth because it is heavy and expensive to transport. Many villages
have already restored their old water sources or are using purification systems.
At the White Pearl Hotel in Hikkaduwa just north of Galle, managing director Ananda
Lal Waduge said he isn't sure what to make of the 600 bottles of Voslauer brand mineral
water that recently showed up in his lobby. The bottles were parked there by an Austrian
relief team staying at the hotel.
The water "has a different kind of taste" than locals are accustomed to, Mr. Waduge said.
"Normal people can't drink it, only foreigners."
On the hotel's beachfront patio, the Austrian relief workers said locals loved the stuff.
Dressed in matching red-and-white team jerseys emblazoned with the words "Austrian
Water Support," the half-dozen volunteers were kicking back with some local Lankan
lager and some cold Voslauer. After some discussion, they conceded that demand for
bottled water is waning. "If we stay a month, maybe we will drink it," said Michael
Gottwald, a 41-year-old volunteer with the group.
Unwanted medicines pose a more serious problem. Wary of potential epidemics, some
doctors and private citizens appear to have unloaded their sample bins and medicine
cabinets and shipped whatever they could find. The shipments have included useful
antibiotics. But they also included drugs that aren't common in many villages and can
easily be abused, such as Valium and antidepressants.
Complicating matters, much of the labeling is in languages most Sri Lankans don't
understand. Jayantha Weerasinghe, a doctor at the Arachikanda Government Hospital in
Hikkaduwa, says he had to turn away medicine because it was labeled in German. "I
couldn't risk giving it to my patients because I wasn't sure what it was," he says.
Moahan Balendra, a volunteer for the Tamils Rehabilitation Organization in Colombo,
says his group recently discovered five packs of Viagra in a shipment of medical goods
from Australia. Now, he hopes the drug will somehow find its way to a needy home.
"We didn't know what to do with it," Mr. Balendra says. So "we gave it to the doctors and
let them decide."