Sri Lanka: A children’s horror story

By Melanie Brooks in Sri Lanka

I thought it was an innocent question: what’s your favourite story? But for a group of children who have lived a real-life horror story, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the answer.

“Our favourite story is about children who were running, and hiding, and passing by dead bodies. Then the children ran more. Then they stayed in a tent. Then there was no more tent. Then the children lived in the ground. The end.”

I stared, wide-eyed, at this gentle eight-year-old boy who told me this story, who was now smiling at me shyly, waiting for my reaction to his narration, proud of himself for being brave enough to speak to the foreigner. Around me, a group of children all shrieked with laughter at the end of the story, repeating the words “no more tent”.

Here in the sprawling tented transit camp in Manik Farm, where the government evacuated people from the conflict zone in the north, you don’t have to look far to see the impact of the war. Parents, who used to tell their children stories of foxes outsmarting cows, with talking animals and laughter, are now too busy adapting to this new life without a home. Instead, children have started telling each other stories – and they are based on horrifying fact.

Nearly 290,000 people are living in overcrowded temporary camps, having fled the final brutal end to a 25-year war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE rebels. Since the war ended May 17, a final wave of people flooded out of the former conflict zone, having lived for months in mud-filled trenches, drinking dirty water, scavenging for enough food to survive. To reach safety, many had to wade through neck-deep lagoons strewn with mines and hidden, underwater bomb craters.

Throughout the camp, smiling faces of children are marred by raised welts, the sufferers of an outbreak of chicken pox. Others scratch absently at their arms, suffering from skin infections developed from months living without bathing properly or access to clean water.

Days in the camps for these children’s parents are long: lining up to get water, four hours. Lining up to get food, one hour, three times a day. Lining up to find out about missing relatives.

Aid agencies and UNICEF have started building temporary learning centres and providing drama plays for children. In one camp in Vavuniya town, parents started a small school for the children in the camp. The teachers are volunteers, including one of CARE’s staff, who teaches physics.

“The children want some kind of routine,” he says, “and they want to learn everything. You can’t imagine how many questions they have!”

A temporary camp will never be home, but CARE is working with the government and other aid agencies to provide shelters, so families can live together in some kind of normalcy, without strangers living on the other side of the tent. We’re trucking in more water, so mothers can spend more time with their children, rather than spending hours waiting for water in the baking 40C heat.

The government plans to relocate most people to their homes in the north by the end of this year, once essential work such as de-mining has been done. But it will take more than a change of location for Sri Lanka’s children of war to recover, and forget the horror story of the last few months.

The next time I visit, I hope to hear the story of the fox who outsmarted the cow. Ravindran, the group’s brave young storyteller, promised he would tell me.

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