katherine's community challenge

Project Visit - Siyath Foundation

Saturday 8 April

Today we visited various projects run by the Siyath Foundation, one of ActionAid's partners in Sri Lanka. The Siyath Foundation works with 3,500 families across over 100 villages and is just one of the local groups ActionAid has been working with since the tsunami. Before the tsunami, the Siyath Foundation was dedicated to supporting women's livelihoods. 75 Siyath members were killed in the tsunami, the Foundation Headquarters were destroyed and all 3,500 families they worked with were affected. None of the foundation's documents survived the tsunami, so they, like the families they work with, had to start again after December 26th 2004. In the immediate aftermath, Siyath worked day and night to deliver food, clothes and cooked meals. When government and aid agencies moved in, they turned their attention to reviving lost livelihoods and helping people find new employment to support their families.

First we went to a Children's Activity Centre at Wenemulla, the village we had been building in. We saw many of our friends from the village as we watched some dancing, a play and games put on by the children. Immediately post-tsunami, the Siyath Foundation provided children who could not go to school with somewhere safe to go, education and one meal a day. The emphasis is on practical skills - 'way of life' teaching, rather than rote learning which is the standard in schools. Now, the centre caters for pre-school children during the day and provides out of school care for the children of homeworkers - like the women in the house next to our build who spin coir in the afternoons. Getting children to express their feelings about the tsunami through various forms of art (painting, songs, drama) has proved an effective form of counselling, along with encouraging children to play with water again.

Making model carrots

Games outside the Children's Centre

Children dancing for us

The vegetable market

Kala Pieris, Executive Director of Siyath

We moved on to the Community Centre at Wenemulla, funded by ActionAid. Here coir yarn is collected, graded and priced. Over the last 26 years, the Siyath Foundation has helped to establish and coordinate a 3,000+ network of coir workers, women who work, often in family groups, spinning yarn out of coconut husks. Homeworkers are women, economically and socially disadvantaged - there is significant domestic abuse and a caste system which, though not as evident as in India, still exists. Siyath has supported the coir workers to get a better price for their products through cooperatives which fix the price of the coir or by making the yarn into products such a mats which are then sold in the UK, USA and Germany through Fair Trade networks.

Many of the coir spinning machines were lost in the tsunami - with ActionAid's support, the Siyath Foundation helped to replace these at a cost of 4,500 rupees per machine (about £30).

We next visited a vegetable market which was initially subsidised but allowed people to retain the diginity of paying for their vegetables - the subsidy is now being reduced and will eventually be phased out. Local vegetable growers were ensured a market for their produce and children and families had access to nutritious food.

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