FOUNDATION OF GOODNESS!!! SEENIGAMA COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT!!!

‘Same vision from top to bottom of the organization’:
Reflections on the achievements of the Foundation of Goodness....By Martin Mulligan
With my wife and children and I arrived in Sri Lanka on the very day the tsunami hit in December 2004 to visit my wife’s family. Had we arrived a few days earlier we may well have been staying with relatives very close to the ocean on the south coast of the island and we knew we had had a lucky escape. I also knew that the rebuilding of people’s lives would be more complex and long-term than the rebuilding of houses and so when I returned to Australia I joined with other Melbourne-based researchers to initiate a study for the Australian aid organization AusAID on the rebuilding of livelihoods and community life in a range of tsunami-affected communities.

As we were in the process of deciding which local communities would be included in the study I met with Peter Frost, who was employed by the Victorian government in Australia to work out how to target aid money that had been raised in Victoria. Peter urged me to include Seenigama because he said that the Foundation for Goodness was the best local organization he had come across and he told me that the Victorian government had agreed to build 84 new dwellings for tsunami victims at Seenigama. The impressive thing about FoG, Peter told me, is that it has a comprehensive plan for addressing community needs. So we selected Seenigama as a case study and we also selected Hambantota and two villages in the Ampara District, where the tsunami impacts were most severe.

By the time I paid my first visit to Seenigama I had already heard glowing reports of what had been achieved and I had heard Kushil Gunasekera give a talk in Melbourne about how FoG had turned the waves of destruction into ‘waves of compassion’. My first visit to Seenigama coincided with the official opening of the wonderful sporting facilities that had been made possible by donations made by the Surrey County Cricket Club in England, the NSW Cricket Association in Australia and the rock musician Bryan Adams and a host of other renowned donors. The highlight of the day was a cricket match between a FoG team and a team led by the British and Australian High Commissioners and, as if scripted, the match was won by the locals with Kushil Gunasekera the undisputed man of the match.

The thing about visiting the Foundation of Goodness at Seenigama for the first time is that it all looks too good to be true; certainly too good to be sustainable when the flood of aid money dries up. It is certainly impressive to see what FoG did with the aid money: highlighted by the building 1,000 new homes in Seenigama and neighbouring villages (with most of them clustered around newly constructed community centres), as well as the construction of the above-mentioned sporting facilities and an impressive new health clinic. However, as a researcher I have been trained to look beyond first impressions and to look more closely at the strengths and weaknesses of what has been achieved. I work in a research centre at RMIT University in Melbourne that has developed a range of innovative research methods for finding out what is going on within local communities. Since my first visit to Seenigama I have spent a total of four weeks in the community, spread across a full year, with my Sinhala-speaking wife, Nelum, and local fieldworkers Sujeewa Irangani and Dilip Kumara. We have conducted surveys and interviews with residents and have collected stories relevant to the life of the community. Yet, the more I look into it the more impressed I have become with what FoG has been able to achieve.

Of course, there are some problems and limitations. People complain about the kitchens in the new houses and even though they had a chance to look at model houses and suggest changes before the building went ahead it seems that the designs did not properly take into account the centrality of food for family and social life in the villages. It also took a long time for some of the new houses to be built—due to circumstances beyond the control of FoG—and people who lost the most in the tsunami often had to wait the longest (sometimes even up to three years specially in receiving a more sophisticated double story duplex homes of a higher value in special surroundings). I think it is fair to say that people who have very little develop ‘survival skills’, which means that they try to get the most out of any opportunities that come their way. So some people who may have better houses and better facilities now than they had before the tsunami continue to lobby for even more. Some people have managed to get more than their fair share. However, our study showed FoG was much better placed to assess local needs than non-local NGOs working in the other three tsunami-affected communities in Sri Lanka and that the distribution of aid has caused less division in Seenigama than in the other communities included in this study.

A particularly severe problem for the community at Seenigama is that opportunities for paid employment are very limited since the closing of the coral mining industry which once employed up to 90 per cent of adults living in the village. Kushil Gunasekera has said that one of the reasons he started FoG, long before the tsunami, was because he supported the ban on coral mining and wanted to generate new livelihoods for people living in the village. It is now clear that the destruction of coral reefs at Seenigama meant that the tsunami hit with much more force than would have been the case if the reefs were intact. So the villagers are now more likely to see the sense in the ban on coral mining. However there are few alternatives, especially in view of the fact that tourism in this area has reached a low level due to international concern about the ongoing war between the national government and Tamil separatists.

Kushil Gunasekera agrees that many of the efforts made to generate alternative livelihoods for former coral miners in the wake of the tsunami have not been successful and much of the effort made to set up micro-enterprises—such as small shops or three-wheeler transport businesses—has failed because there is only room for a small number of such enterprises to succeed. More successful has been a well-targeted medium-size brush handle factory that employs up to 15 villagers and the Diving School that can give experienced divers new skills to pick up employment in places ranging from Galle and Colombo to the Middle East. FoG has also adopted a long-term strategy for generating a greater diversity of employment opportunities by concentrating on the development of computer skills and by raising money for scholarships that enable young villagers to get a much better education.

Of course, there is a severe limit on what can be done locally to generate employment opportunities because this will often reflect developments in the national and/or global economies. Local initiatives—such as the Diving School—can aim to take advantage of wider opportunities. However, at a time when paid employment is hard to find and when food prices are rising it might be important to focus on food security and work that has been done by FoG on encouraging the planting of ‘home gardens’ could be expanded. Perhaps more could be done to enhance local trading and bartering.

A survey that we have conducted across the four tsunami-affected communities in Sri Lanka shows that people living in Seenigama feel less safe than those who have been relocated further inland, mostly because they fear the arrival of another tsunami. However, a much higher proportion of people living in Seenigama feel either satisfied or very satisfied with feeling part of their community compared to those living in the other tsunami-affected communities in Sri Lanka or two tsunami-affected communities living in Chennai in India. Almost 90 per cent of those surveyed in Seenigama said that they felt that decisions made about life in their ‘neighbourhood’ were made in the best interests of the community as a whole while less than 50 per cent of those living in another surveyed tsunami community in Sri Lanka felt this way and the results were even lower for the communities in Chennai. The survey as a whole confirmed that there is a much stronger sense of community in Seenigama than in any of the other tsunami-affected communities and FoG can claim much of the credit for this outcome.

FoG has already achieved some spectacular success with its innovative focus on sporting opportunities for village youth; already turning out a national novices swimming champion (who only had access to a proper pool and coach for about a year before his success) and a highly talented young cricketer (who lost both his parents) representing Sri Lanka schools under 15. More recently the village school team from Wimala Buddhi Maha Vidyalaya emerged as all island under 12 volley ball champions and the next village Thotagamuwa School were runners-up. Both of these teams were sponsored by FoG. Indeed FoG’s emphasis on opportunities for the young appears to be visionary and another significant innovation is the founding of Goodness Clubs in which the very young are challenged to work out a conscious ethic for daily life. FoG is clearly driven by Kushil Gunasekera’s conception of applied Buddhist philosophy, centred on ‘unconditional compassion’ and a clear sense of responsibility to all others who share this planet.

Indeed it is Buddhist philosophy that drives the ‘business model’ of FoG. When asked how FoG can sustain 30 structured programs that were initially set up with aid money, Kushil replied that he does not start by thinking about limits but about possibilities that might grow into something unexpected. He says that it has only been by taking advantage of opportunities as they arise and by responding to people in need with unconditional compassion that FoG has been able to achieve what it has. He believes that generosity will ultimately be repaid and, although he admits that sustaining an elaborate model of community development is his biggest challenge yet, he is confident that the momentum can be continued. Kushil cites the example of the Rainbow Health Clinic that was started in one section of his tsunami-damaged family villa by two volunteer doctors from U.S.A. who were trying to treat those who were injured or traumatized by the tsunami. That clinic now services up to 1,400 people a month from 25 or more villages surrounding Seenigama and it continues to attract support from overseas benefactors. It has grown to include a psycho-social counseling service and a dental clinic. This overall development model now caters to 20,000 beneficiaries from 25 villages in the Seenigama region with the focus on bringing the best out of disadvantaged rural children and youth to excel with better opportunities that multiplied with what Kushil Gunesekera has called ‘the waves of compassion’.

Key to the future of the ‘Seenigama model of community development’ is the fact that a scaled-down version of it has already been replicated in the nearby village of Udamulla.. The aim here—in what has been called the Hearbeat Project—was to build a fairly low cost community centre that would incorporate the most essential elements of the more elaborate program developed through the MCC Centre of Excellence at Seenigama. The centre at Udamulla includes a well-used computer training room, a large covered space for classes and community gatherings, and a small accommodation unit for volunteers offering to support education programs. The program includes a Goodness Club for young children. FoG is convinced that this model for constructing a village ‘heartbeat’ could be replicated in many parts of the world and Kushil Gunasekera is trying to promote the model internationally. However, for the model to be successfully exported the home base at Seenigama needs to be sustained.

The challenges that lie ahead for FoG and the ‘Seenigama model’ are quite daunting. However, the organisation is facing those challenges with impressive confidence; a confidence that is built on the fact that they have already achieved more than anyone might have imagined. As a visitor who was conducting computer training courses at Seenigama told me in October 2008: ‘The most impressive thing about this organization is that the vision is the same from the top to the bottom.’

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