Last month, Slave Lake resident Jose Antony travelled to India for two weeks and saw first-hand the effects of the tsunami that caused devastation across South East Asia and struck parts of India’s coast on Dec. 26.
Antony returned this month after a tour of his native province of Kerala, India.
He wasn’t able to visit the worst affected areas of the province, to the south. The roads leading to Trivandrum and Quilon, cities near the southern tip of India’s coastline were still not open for travel, says Antony.
He was able to see the coast near Calicut, a more northerly city in Kerala where he is originally from. He visited a small village, Puthiyappa, nearby on the India Ocean.
“They didn’t have any casualties there but lot of houses and boats were destroyed,” says Antony.
The inhabitants of Puthiyappa live mostly by fishing and their dwellings by the sea are simple huts made of bamboo and palm leaf. The tsunami carried away the homes, leaving nothing but the concrete floors that most were built on, says Antony.
Since the disaster, people have returned to Puthiyappa and are trying to rebuild.
“We were talking to the government and the agencies to see whether they can shift them from the sea shore at least a kilometre but people don’t want to go,” he Antony. “They were all moved to another location to stay for the time being. Still they’re (rebuilding) in the same place. Only a little place off. If the same thing happens it can come back to the same place but people don’t want to move from there. They just want to stay the same place.”
The reconstruction effort hasn’t attracted the sort of outside assistance that areas further south and on the eastern coast have, but local groups have raised funds to help, says Antony.
For instance, the newspaper in Calicut has become a clearinghouse for donations from Indian expatriates.
When he was looking for a way to help, a city councillor, Salam Vellayal, put Antony in touch with an organization called Niveditha Social Cultural Organization that is trying to rebuild people homes.
Antony is the director of an Edmonton, Alberta based company, Responsible Planetary Concepts, that has built housing in the developing world before, and thought he might be able to lend his expertise to the humanitarian effort, but he says that NSCO is already doing good work. The homes are not complex and the materials costs are not huge, he says.
For now, he decided the best way he could help out was to donate some money to NSCO to help them with their reconstruction effort.

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