The ‘birth’ of the Camp Coconut idea happened on the morning of 27th December 2004 at about 5.00 am. I was sitting on the verandha of a delapidated plantation bungalow, laptop on my knee, looking out over a serene landscape of tea bushes and low-lying hills about 15 kms inland from the southern Sri Lankan beach resort of Ahangama, near Galle.
I’m not normally up at 5 o’clock in the morning, it’s just that this particular night, I hadn’t slept at all!
It was the morning after the Tsunami struck the coastline of Sri Lanka and my family (six children, my wife, mother-in-law, my wife’s brother, his wife and their three children) had been sitting on the terrace of the Hotel Club Lanka having breakfast, not 20 metres away from the sea. The day before we had enjoyed a happy family Christmas day, swimming in the pool and lying on the sunbeds provided.
The Tsunami hit the hotel at 9.30am on the 26th December and many of us were washed away in the water, other family members watching the horror from a first floor balcony. We were extremely lucky to survive, unlike a couple of other hotel guests who perished in the floodwaters.
We had been taken, along with the remaining hotel guest contingent, by the owners of the hotel to the tea plantation that they owned. It was situated inland from the coast and was therefore accessible, unlike all other roads along a 400 mile stretch of coastline.
Thirty surviving guests stayed the night at two of the estate bungalows but with only 3 beds between 14 of us, only the children managed to get a bit of sleep. The adults grabbed what chairs they could and after a dose of red wine that we had salvaged from one of the waterlogged suitcases (and which we had, incidentally, been forced to drink out of plastic lime green children’s beach buckets and watering cans – no glasses!) we sat deep in our own thoughts as to what might have been.
As soon as it was light, I determined to get up, go outside with my laptop and write up the astonishing series of events of the previous 24 hours. This I did, and it led me to the thought that we must have been saved for a greater purpose than merely treading water and waiting for ultimate retirement. It’s not that our lives weren’t full – we did have seven children aged 25 down to 3 – it’s just that our lives perhaps weren’t being used to benefit others outside of our own immediate family.
Since 26/12, we have been involved in a number of relief projects, working in the displaced persons camps, repairing schools, supporting orphan children and helping to finance the building of temporary houses before the monsoon arrived in May of this year.
The idea of Camp Coconut had come to me that early morning on the balcony at the tea estate – a centre where local Tsunami-affected children could feel safe, away from the coast but near enough to their family and community. But it took my wife and I a few weeks to talk it through and firm up on what we would or could do. After all, as soon as we had returned to our home in Colombo, we became involved in the more urgent effort of needing to get food and shelter provision to the many thousands of displaced people around the coast. Through this relief work, we met many wonderful people who have subsequently become good friends but there were two ‘contacts’ in particular who have been instrumental in helping us get Camp Coconut to where it is now.
The first was a Sri Lankan lady, Kumari Kulanatunga and her husband, Sumedha who were very involved in the relief efforts around Matara and, in particular, the re-building and refurbishment of a very large Convent school on the seafront in the town. We helped fund some of the work at the school and through that connection, she found out about our rough plan for a children’s centre in the area. We were looking at potentiual small coconut plantation sites where we could build a community centre when she suggested that we look at an old ancestral home that belonged to her father-in-law.
It fitted the bill perfectly in every way. We could even lease it rather than having to come up with the money to buy it! We signed the lease on May 30th 2005 (my birthday).
The second person to whom we feel indebted is Lalith, Development Director of a local Sri Lankan NGO called Tab Relief. This particular NGO was linked to our church in Colombo and we had been working with them on a few of their many post-Tsunami projects. I had told Lalith of what we planned to do and he was so supportive from the first day we discussed it with him. In time, he suggested that we take on as project co-ordinator for Camp Coconut, one of his best project managers who had just completed a 60 unit temporary housing scheme for them in Angulana, just south of Colombo.
This man, Chandrasena and his wife, Devika have joined the Camp Coconut team and have shown immense organisational zeal in the past 3 months. He immediately seemed to grasp our vision for the place and it matched his own and that of his wife’s – they, too, had a sense of wanting to work with and help children in need.
Chandrasena and Devika have moved into the old house on the site, together with their two children, and have single-handedly organised and implemented the first phase of the building program :–
- Building a 600sq ft Daycentre
- Building a perimeter wall around part of the site
- Clearing nearly 3 acres of ‘jungle’
- Levelling the land for a Volleyball/basketball court
- Employing labour to carry out these and other maintenance tasks
After just 10 weeks, we are nearing the time when we can welcome our first batch of children for after-school activities.
This story will unfold as time goes on…………
Nick and Anne Wynne-Morgan
