The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka's Tsunami Disaster

By Michele Ruth Gamburd

In December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal regions of Sri Lanka. Six months later, Michele Ruth Gamburd returned to the village where she had been conducting research for many years and began collecting residents' stories of the disaster and its aftermath: the chaos and loss of the flood itself; the sense of community and leveling of social distinctions as people worked together to recover and regroup; and the local and national politics of foreign aid as the country began to rebuild. In The Golden Wave, Gamburd describes how the catastrophe changed social identities, economic dynamics, and political structures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253011503

Book preview

Introduction

Political Ethnography of Disaster

"WHY DO THEY put a ‘T’ in front of sunaami [tsunami] in English?" my driver asked me.¹ We were humming along the winding coastal road that morning in 2005 in his trishaw, an open three-wheeled auto-rickshaw.

I explained that tsunami was a Japanese word and that TS was one of their letters. They have a lot of tsunamis in Japan, so they have a special word for it. And that word made itself known with a vengeance around the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day, December 26, 2004.

On Sri Lanka’s southwest coast, the waves arrived before their moniker. Having described his harrowing experiences with the inundating water in Balapitiya, Pradeep exclaimed, "I learned the name tsunami only three days later!"²

His friend Manoj nodded and said, There was no electricity, but I heard on a battery-powered radio that this was what had happened. He continued in English, "When I first heard the word tsunami, it was Greek to me."

Similarly, a garment factory worker told me, We learned about volcanoes and earthquakes in school, but never about tsunamis.

Her colleague added, "We didn’t even know the word; instead when it happened here we said, ‘Muhuda goDa galanawaa’ [The sea is flowing into the land]."³

And the sea did flow into the land, sometimes up to a mile beyond the high tide mark. The massive surge of water took people completely by surprise—taking lives, wrecking livelihoods, destroying homes, and massively rearranging social, political, and economic realities along 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s coastline.

In this book, I focus on issues of culture and politics in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s 2004 tsunami. As an anthropologist, I bring my discipline’s holistic approach to bear in understanding the social consequences of natural hazards and the cultural processes at work in humanitarian relief efforts. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic data gathered on the southwest coast, I document the initial chaos that followed the disaster, exploring how people survived and made sense of the death and destruction. I track the displaced from short-term camps to temporary shelters and permanent housing schemes and examine the power structures that quickly arose in those contexts. I talk with community leaders who mediated between aid recipients and international donor organizations, consult government administrators about regional and national relief efforts, and interview local entrepreneurs whose businesses suffered and recovered. I listen to observers who critically evaluated relief and recovery operations for equity, accountability, transparency, and corruption. And I consider how people talked about themselves and others around them, reenvisioning class status, ethnicity, and citizenship in the wake of disaster.

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004

Tsunamis occur as a consequence of underwater earthquakes at subduction zones where one tectonic plate slides under another. On December 26, 2004, a massive, magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred about 1,100 miles away and 2.5 hours before the resultant tsunami reached Sri Lanka’s east coast (Tomita et al. 2006, 99; USGS Earthquake Center 2004). Off the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, about 720 miles of the plate boundary between the Indo-Australian and the southeast Eurasian plates slipped, horizontally displacing the sea floor roughly thirty feet and vertically displacing it up to forty-five feet (Parliament of Sri Lanka 2005, 25; USGS Earthquake Center 2011). The upward displacement caused the tsunami; lateral displacement does not so drastically affect the water above it.

Tsunami waves propagate almost imperceptibly through deep water at five hundred miles per hour; closer to shore they slow and crest (Pacific Tsunami Warning Center 2011). Ashore, waves cause damage in several different ways. As it arrives, a wave batters anything in its path; one cubic yard of water weighs about a ton. In addition, the water inundates the land, and as it recedes it causes erosion and sweeps anything movable out to sea (Parliament of Sri Lanka 2005, 28). Tsunami events often consist of multiple waves.

The Indian Ocean Tsunami affected thirteen countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Mauritius, Myanmar, the Seychelles, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Thailand. In 2006, the death toll stood at 227,898, with the majority of the fatalities in Indonesia (167,540), Sri Lanka (35,322), India (16,269), and Thailand (8,212) (Telford, Cosgrave, and Houghton 2006, 16). Initial estimates placed the death toll at least 50,000 higher, and subsequent counts have reduced it further. Worldwide, approximately 1.7 million people were displaced permanently or temporarily (Telford, Cosgrave, and Houghton 2006, 16).

Damaged by the waves, beachside clocks in the eastern Sri Lankan town of Batticaloa stopped at 9:05 a.m. (Gaasbeek 2010, 126). Wrapping around the island, the first tsunami wave arrived in Galle at 9:15 a.m. local time that Sunday morning (Tomita et al. 2006, 105) and continued up the coast. The second wave, which arrived thirty minutes later, was the largest. This wave averaged fifteen feet high along the southwest coast, with localized traces as high as thirty feet in certain places (Tomita et al. 2006, 99).

In Sri Lanka, estimates of the death toll continue to vary even years after the disaster. For example, Point Pedro Institute of Development researchers Muttukrishna Sarvananthan and H. M. P. Sanjeewanie put the number at 36,858 (2008, 340), and geographers Philippe Le Billon and Arno Waizenegger suggest the figure 39,000 (2007, 417). Although other figures continue to circulate, the official estimate was revised downward to 31,000 (Kuhn 2010, 44; Parliament of Sri Lanka 2005, 27). In Sri Lanka, approximately a million people were initially affected by the tsunami in December 2004 (Kuhn 2010, 44–45). By mid-June 2005, the number of displaced had fallen to about five hundred thousand with over 110,000 houses damaged or destroyed (Parliament of Sri Lanka 2005, 27; Institute of Policy Studies 2005, 40).

Commentators have repeatedly employed the adjective unprecedented to describe the scale of both the disaster and the international response that followed (Institute of Policy Studies 2005, 53; Kuhn 2010, 42; K. Silva 2009, 61, 66; de Silva 2009, 1). For tsunami-affected people around the Indian Ocean basin, donors raised US$13.5 billion almost immediately (Khasalamwa 2010, 72; Telford, Cosgrave, and Houghton 2006, 16). The Institute of Policy Studies reports that for Sri Lanka, An estimated US$2.2 billion was committed by donors for tsunami reconstruction at the Kandy Donor Conference in June 2005 (2005, 53). Roughly half that amount had been delivered as of 2007 (BBC 2009).

Private individuals, local and foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the Sri Lankan government, and other nations engaged in immediate relief efforts to house, clothe, and feed the displaced and provide medical aid for the injured. Cleanup activities took place to bury the dead, clear roads, and dispose of rubble. As relief efforts entered their intermediate stage, aid flowed to reconstruct damaged infrastructure such as roads, railways, bridges, schools, and houses. Development money, insurance payments, and private investments supported the restoration of coastal industries such as garment factories, fisheries, and tourist hotels.

The government met the disaster with several levels of official response. The tsunami prompted a reorganization of government legislation dealing with development and disaster recovery (Centre for Policy Alternatives 2006b, 5). The Sri Lankan Parliament passed the Tsunami Act No. 16 of 2005, as well as the Disaster Management Act No. 13 of 2005 that established the National Council for Disaster Management (Leitan 2009, 7; Parliament of Sri Lanka 2005, 11).⁴ A series of government organizations also evolved during 2005 and 2006. Initially, the government formed the Centre for National Operations and three subsidiary taskforces. These were replaced in February 2005 by the Task Force for Relief (TAFOR) and the Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation (TAFREN) (Centre for Policy Alternatives 2006b, 3). These organizations and several others were subsequently replaced in November 2005 by a centralized state agency, the Reconstruction and Development Agency (RADA) (Satkunanathan 2009, 12). The government’s civil service bureaucracy dealt with the disaster; local elected bodies such as the provincial councils, municipal councils, and urban councils played minimal if any roles (Leitan 2009, 7; see also de Silva 2009, 6).

The government also developed strategies to accommodate the wave of relief workers and aid money. Sociologist K. Tudor Silva (2009, 67) reports, As many as 500 international NGOs arrived in Sri Lanka in response to the disaster. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) worked to coordinate governmental agencies and humanitarian organizations (K. Silva 2009, 67; UNOCHA 2011). Policy analyst Sunil Bastian (2009, 232) suggests, The Sri Lankan government pretty much privatised tsunami rehabilitation. He notes that during the first year of tsunami recovery (2005) international NGOs were the principal actors, with government bureaucrats providing information; after Mahinda Rajapaksa’s election in late 2005, the central government took on a greater role (Bastian 2009, 232–33).

Development specialist Piers Blaikie notes that the humanitarian response in Sri Lanka, for all its flaws . . . compares favourably in a number of crucial aspects to the humanitarian and recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina and the disaster in New Orleans in 2005 (2010, 5). Other observers remark upon the many positive aspects of the response to the disaster (Brun and Lund 2010, 9; Gaasbeek 2010), though criticisms also abound.

Sri Lanka and the Village of Naeaegama

Sri Lanka is a teardrop-shaped island located at the southern tip of India. At the crossroads of Indian Ocean maritime trade, the island has had strong regional and global connections for millennia. Ceylon (as it was then known) came under Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial rule for roughly 450 years, prized for its spices and later for its productive plantation economy. Since its independence in 1948, the country has continued its transnational connections with the export of tea and garments, the migration of laborers to the Persian Gulf, and the arrival of foreign tourists who visit ancient cultural heritage sites and bask on balmy beaches.

Twenty million people live in Sri Lanka. Roughly three-quarters of the population are Sinhala speakers, most of whom inhabit the island’s humid Southwest. Tamil speakers live in the arid North and East, in the central highlands, and in the major cities. Many of the Sinhala speakers are Buddhists, and many of the Tamil speakers are Hindu. Sinhala- and Tamil-speaking Christians live in the coastal areas, and Sinhala- and Tamil-speaking Muslims live throughout the country.

Although Sri Lanka ranks high in quality-of-life indicators such as literacy and life expectancy, the nation has been plagued by a long-standing ethnic conflict between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority. Rooted in the colonial period, the conflict bloomed from 1983 to 2009 into a separatist civil war between the guerilla Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government’s armed forces. Major issues of contention included the devolution of power to Tamil-majority areas, the choice of national language, access to higher education, and Sinhala development projects in Tamil homelands. Sri Lanka also underwent two internal insurgencies within the Sinhala population, one in 1970–71 and another in 1988–90; these contestations arose over lack of opportunities for rural youth because of entrenched hierarchies of class and caste. Struggles over power and inequality continue in many areas of social life.

I have done ethnographic fieldwork since 1992 in the Sinhala-Buddhist community of 1,100 people who live in the village that I call Naeaegama. Naeaegama is located near the main west coast highway about fifty miles south of the nation’s capital city, Colombo. A mile from a bustling commercial junction with a post office, a police station, and many shops, Naeaegama has a Buddhist temple and an elementary school. Tall trees shade narrow roads, and people in tile-roofed homes call greetings across stick fences to passersby.

The majority of Naeaegama’s residents come from the locally dominant Halaagama caste, with the remainder from the Berava (drummer) caste. Many of the men are employed in the armed services, and many women work in local garment factories or as domestic servants in the Persian Gulf (M. Gamburd 2000). Some families make a living by cultivating, harvesting, and processing cinnamon or by working in the tourist industry.

My experience with the village goes back to 1968, when, as a three-year-old child, I accompanied my mother and father while my mother, also an anthropologist, performed her dissertation research (G. Gamburd 2010). Hosted by two schoolteachers and their three sons, my family stayed in Naeaegama for eighteen months. Siri, our hosts’ eldest son, worked closely with my mother on her research. When I returned to Naeaegama twenty-five years later to start research for my own PhD, I again stayed with Siri’s family, and Siri served as my interpreter and research associate.

Shocked by the newspaper headlines on the day after Christmas in 2004, my mother and I immediately attempted to call Siri in Sri Lanka. All telephone circuits were busy and remained so for nearly a week, during which time our anxiety grew as media coverage revealed the magnitude of the multination disaster. When I finally reached Siri on New Year’s Day, his voice broke with emotion as he described the horrible smells and unthinkable sights of the deaths and damage in the Naeaegama area: There is no medicine in the hospitals. There is no water to drink. When you go to the junction, you will cry when you see the houses and the people. My mother and I quickly sent funds.

Naeaegama is located a mile from the beach. At this spot on the southwest coast, the seawater came only a half mile inland. None of the village houses was damaged, but two villagers died in the tsunami. Living so close to the ocean, Naeaegama residents were on the frontlines of the initial relief effort, hosting in their homes and at the Buddhist temple the many friends, relatives, and acquaintances who had fled from the waves. Area people remained keen observers and integral participants in the relief and recovery activities that followed the disaster.

I had spent a month in Naeaegama in November 2004, missing the tsunami by three weeks. In July 2005, I returned to a much-changed scene. Through conversations with a wide range of people, I learned about the tsunami and its ongoing aftermath. My ethnographic research focused on the Naeaegama area and extended more broadly between Aluthgama and Ambalangoda on the southwest coast. To observe relief and recovery operations unfold, I returned to Sri Lanka in 2006 and 2009 for further fieldwork. As humanitarian efforts moved to interim and longer-term measures, people eagerly discussed both the event and its aftermath. Their reflections provide the data for this book.

Themes and Topics

In the aftermath of the tsunami, people focused on physical needs for sustenance and shelter as well as social needs for status and respectability. Because of the southwest coast’s proximity to the nation’s capital, its high visibility as a foreign tourist zone with luxury hotels, and its political clout at the national level as a Sinhala-majority area, the Southern Province was quickly and deeply inundated by a golden wave of aid. In the disruption caused by the tsunami and the subsequent windfall of disaster relief, people struggled to achieve social, political, and economic power. They made meaning out of the tsunami’s chaos; came to terms with death, damage, and destruction; rebuilt alliances, communities, and social hierarchies; and crusaded for equity, transparency, accountability, and justice.

Part One of this book documents the immediate aftermath of the disaster—turmoil, damage, and death followed by community solidarity and widespread efforts to reassert order. Chapter 1 conveys personal experiences of the natural hazard. Everyone had a story about where he or she was—or could have been—when the tsunami struck, or about others who were caught in the waves. They talked about a world gone mad, in which the tsunami violated cultural and natural expectations of space and order, disrupted long-standing habits, and washed away sources of safety and symbols of identity. Their fresh and vivid portrayals impressed upon me the magnitude of the tsunami event in terms of the mass of water that came ashore and the resultant human displacement. Narrative themes emerged, revealing the importance of people (kin, colleagues, adversaries, and strangers), places (landmarks and homes), and things (money, jewelry, certificates, photos, and furniture). People spoke of their struggles to save themselves and others, their searches for relatives, their efforts to clean or rebuild homes, and their uncertainties about the future. Beachside residents talked about their fears of another tsunami and their changed relationship with the sea. People mourned human and animal lives, loss of livelihood, and environmental destruction. As they spoke, my interlocutors also remembered the strong sense of solidarity and the helpfulness of family, friends, and strangers that characterized the immediate aftermath. Through their narratives, they crafted individual identities, rebuilt community for the survivors, and commemorated the dead.

One might assume that dying in the tsunami was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But folk theories and scholarly analysis both suggest a more nuanced causality, as I explore in chapter 2. Naeaegama discussions of tsunami deaths incorporate both moral and geophysical explanations for fatalities. A provocative statement that karmic justice caused the tsunami spurred a series of conversations about ethics and earthquakes, during which people talked about the karmic implications of the fisheries industry and the ecological impact of mining coral from reefs.

The concept of vulnerability describes the role of predisaster social and economic status and geographical location in determining how a natural hazard affects members of a community (Oliver-Smith 1999, 29). For example, people’s location on marginal lands and their lack of savings or other resources influence their ability to survive a disaster and recover quickly from it. I use this lens to consider Naeaegama’s tsunami fatalities, exploring how gender, poverty, and caste status influenced the death of two villagers who perished when their peers, others like them who were with them at the time, survived. Their families also faced different challenges in obtaining death compensation from the government. The comparison reveals the social distance between the two families as well as surprising vulnerabilities shared by the deceased.

One criticism of the concept of vulnerability is that it has also brought with it assumptions concerning the ‘victims’ of disasters, and their powerlessness, which encourage humanitarian workers to underestimate the agency of the people they set out to help, and to fail to understand (or even attempt to find out) what the affected people can do themselves (Blaikie 2010, 5). Displaced people’s passive response in the wake of a disaster may stem from the centralized, bureaucratized, top-down approach taken by those who administer aid.

In chapter 3, I explore power dynamics and governance strategies in the short-term camps that arose spontaneously in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. At first, camps reflected a strong sense of equality and shared humanity. The casual arrangements quickly transitioned into more formal structures as camp leaders established order from chaos. Discussing the cases of short-term camps in a school, several Buddhist monasteries, and a Christian church, I describe the provision of food, shelter, medicine, and sanitation. Camp administrators exercised power over people and places by creating forms for residents to fill out and by defining and guarding the boundaries of their camps. To distribute aid with equity, camp leaders restricted residents’ right to participate in their own rescue. Ingratitude, anger, and fights over relief materials arose as displaced people grew increasingly marginalized from and distrustful of the administrators, who in turn grew to mistrust the camp residents. Reflecting on these dynamics, camp leaders proposed more and better administration rather than increased participation by the displaced. Despite problems, however, both leaders and camp residents were rightly proud of and pleased with these emergency accommodations.

Framing a natural hazard or disaster as an emergency has political consequences. Indeed, response to such events is urgent and must be quick. But the emergency framework can also open the door to policy measures that people might reject in less urgent situations (Button 2010). The rapid centralizing of power reduces democratic decision making. Bastian (2009, 217, 231) urges theorists to examine how, under cover of humanitarian efforts, international economic and political agendas are pursued and local input is ignored or refused. In the rush to fix things up fast, humanitarian workers can unfortunately implement culturally inappropriate policies—one size fits all solutions that in actuality fit no one well (Blaikie 2010, 4). Similarly, under cover of disaster, capitalist interests can pursue neoliberal agendas in a variety of economic contexts (Hyndman 2011; Klein 2007; Schuller 2008). Part Two of this book examines the intermediate aftermath of the tsunami, exploring the political economic dynamics of disaster relief in the arenas of housing construction, humanitarian aid, and business recovery.

Temporary shelters and permanent houses were provided for people who lost their dwellings in the tsunami. I begin chapter 4 with an analysis of the one-hundred-meter exclusion zone, an ecological setback within which the government originally prohibited reconstruction. Changing policies on the buffer zone created uncertainty and confusion; moreover, the reduction of the exclusion zone from one hundred meters to thirty-five meters a year after the tsunami, in conjunction with the provision of new houses and property for all households within the original buffer, opened the door for the potential transfer of seaside property from residents to hotel corporations and wealthy speculators.

Using data gathered in 2005, 2006, and 2009, I trace the progress of resettlement from temporary shelter camps to permanent homes constructed on residents’ own property and in donor-built housing settlements. Issues of equity frequently arose in the distribution of homes, and both camp residents and government spokespersons voiced strong opinions about deserving and undeserving recipients. Touring two housing projects built in 2006, I ask why in 2009 the new communities faced significant structural deficits (wells without water and walls with cracks) as well as, in one project, high levels of mutual distrust and disharmony. Salable property, serviceable shelter, proximate social networks, and participatory decision making are vital factors in the livability of new villages.

Continuing my focus on the relationship between policy and power, chapter 5 introduces the reader to local liaisons who mediated between international donors and aid recipients. Geographer Jennifer Hyndman points out, Aid effectiveness refers to a popular neoliberal strategy on the part of donors to reward recipient countries with ‘sound economic policies’ and ‘good governance’ with international assistance (2009, 39). Not unexpectedly, the definitions of good and sound originate with the foreign donors, not the recipients, and are seldom open to negotiation or refinement despite rhetoric about local empowerment and participation in aid programs. Although critiques of the foreign attitudes and underlying assumptions that accompany aid are vital, it is also valuable to examine the leverage that local program participants have to modify the system and preserve their existing structures and values. Through in-depth case studies of a half-dozen intermediaries, I focus on the challenge of mediating between well-meaning foreign donors and deserving tsunami-affected locals. The liaisons gained power, prestige, and influence, but they risked their reputations in the process, as recipient communities modified, critiqued, and resisted aid initiatives. Issues of equity, transparency, and accountability arose as these intermediaries navigated donor logics and local politics.

By destroying coastal businesses, the tsunami created opportunities for change. In the first half of chapter 6, I examine how the tsunami affected tourist hotels and affiliated industries on the southwest coast. I discuss damage to tourism infrastructure, strategies to clean and rebuild hotels, aid for workers, and factors that affected the return of foreign tourists. Political economic dynamics influenced ownership of beachside property, worker wages, and control of investment capital. The second half of the chapter deals with the construction industry, which went through a boom period after the tsunami. I present a controversy regarding the removal of beachside rubble, which some viewed as refuse but others wished to reuse. Considerable consolidation and centralization took place in the construction industry during this period, and local laborers did not necessarily benefit. I conclude by considering two local entrepreneurs engaged in manufacturing cement blocks, asking how the boom and bust in construction affected these small businesses.

After the tsunami, the owners of a cloth shop salvaged what they could of their water-soaked goods. Describing their efforts, the owners’ cousin reported, They had washed some of the cloth and left it outside to dry. The next day they found that someone had stolen all that material. With a frown, she stated, There are people who will take advantage of any opportunity.

Siri cynically commented, "Merit water [pin watura]."

Our interviewee cryptically replied, "A golden wave [ratarang raellak]."

Similarly, as I ran through my informed-consent protocol with Ari, a local civil servant, I mentioned that one goal of my research project was to gather data on what worked and what could have been done better in tsunami relief and recovery operations. Without any prompting, Ari went straight to what he saw as the heart of the problem: Some people like the tsunami because they can get money unfairly. They would like another tsunami to come.

"Golden water [ran watura]!" Siri exclaimed.

Nodding, Ari replied, Merit water.

The phrases merit water, golden water, and golden wave turned up frequently in conversations about the post-tsunami aid environment. The tsunami triggered major disruption in the social sphere, caused catastrophic losses and windfall gains, opened up opportunities for the unscrupulous to profit, and brought about moments when the dignified or timid could lose out if they hesitated to push, shove, and grab for handouts. In the beginning, there were few rules; thereafter the rules, though present, contained gray areas. Many individuals and agencies distributed aid, and they had too much to do, in too little time, for too many needy people. Rumors suggested that people could exercise their connections and get something to which they were hardly or only marginally entitled, or that an adversary could block one’s access to needed and deserved goods and services. People were uncertain, frightened, angry, jealous, and hyperconscious of the wins and losses of their peers, their betters, and their inferiors. Outside the disaster zone, people who merited no aid watched their neighbors get gas cookers, sewing machines, bicycles, fishing boats, and new houses—all significant indexes of prestige. In this social ambiance, the golden wave functioned as a summarizing symbol (Ortner 1973, 1339–40), crystallizing people’s concerns about inequity, immorality, lack of accountability, and artificially inflated social statuses.

As they discussed the post-tsunami aid environment, speakers revealed much about the sort of person they considered themselves to be and how they viewed the character and actions of others. In Part Three of this book, I examine how people constructed identities through narrative practices (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). I explore issues of class status in chapter 7. By talking about theft and looting, people deplored the violation of ownership invited by the tsunami’s waves. They related generic horror stories and more complex and nuanced accounts of actual cases of suspected crime. In tsunami-specific cases of cheating, Naeaegama villagers discussed instances in which low-status golden wave people received undeserved aid, wasted aid, or sold what they had been given.

The discussion of humanitarian aid leads to an analysis of the nature of gift giving. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the complex obligations, long-term reciprocal relationships, and status competition associated with the circulation of gifts. Giving a gift puts the giver in a position superior to the recipient. As beneficiaries of quantities of humanitarian aid so huge that they could never be reciprocated, citizens of Sri Lanka struggled to define their position in international relations as something other than lowly beggars. In the local and national context, Naeaegama villagers emphasized not what they had received but what they had given. These dynamics shed new light on the commonly heard statement I received nothing—a claim that should be read at least in part as a strategic and performative bid for middle-class status. As a popular local poem illustrates, people defined middle-class status as having lost or given away more than they gained in the tsunami and equated high status with the refusal of aid.

In Naeaegama, the charitable windfall in the aftermath of the tsunami raised questions of accountability and transparency as people struggled with the morality of aid distribution. Although the deserving usually received what they needed, some undeserving people also benefited because of disorganization and duplication of effort. Media coverage and local narratives discussed such irregularities in terms of incompetence and corruption. In chapter 8, I explore accusations and rebuttals of fraud in the relief and recovery operations. I begin by analyzing a narrative of governmental inefficiency and seeming indifference. I then compare the perceived susceptibility of local aid workers to favor political allies, friends, and relatives with foreigners’ assumedly equitable but uninformed modes of distribution. Turning to a national scandal, I discuss media and local reactions to the Helping Hambantota case, in which a high-ranking politician sequestered Rs. 83 million (about US$830,000) of international aid in three private bank accounts, allegedly to further his own political ambitions.⁵ I also examine local-level accusations of fraud.

In the second half of the chapter, I consider how local government officials rebutted accusations of corruption by claiming that they did their best with inadequate resources under trying circumstances to deal with constituents who were frightened, angry, impatient, jealous, greedy, and demanding. Three interlocutors argued that the scale of the event and the lack of a disaster plan were more to blame for perceived inequities than moral turpitude or corrupt intentions. Using the same moral criteria and systems of logic that drove the widely circulating accusations of corruption, these civil servants portrayed themselves as hardworking, honest, upstanding officials who gave without receiving. Simultaneously they implied that those who