Thailand

Organization: Population and Community Development Association (PDA)
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Project: Coastal Village Rehabilitation Project
Website: http://www.pda.or.th/cbers/index.htm
Q&A with Kipper Blakeley, Planning Officer, Community Based Emergency Relief Services (CBERS), PDA

Project Description
PDA activities include the restoration of livelihoods to the coastal villagers in the Krabi and Phang provinces including assistance with boat rebuilding, water sanitation, educational funding, and tree planting.

Q & A with Kipper Blakeley, Planning Officer, Community Based Emergency Relief Services (CBERS), PDA

How did your organization become involved in tsunami relief work?
PDA was already working in several of the communities in the province of Krabi, and we were in the process of finishing our rural development center. When the Tsunami hit, our staff was able to travel almost immediately to remote villages - villages mostly out of the public limelight - and assess their needs.

Since CBERS already had experience in disaster areas from working with the Khmer refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we came up with a short-term relief program which stressed self-help and dignity. We developed a long-term strategy for the rehabilitation of these communities based on their needs, employing the same practices and methodologies that PDA has been using for over thirty years in Thailand.

What kinds of relief work are you principally involved in?
PDA is focused on long-term rehabilitation of the Tsunami-affected communities - those activities which are required to return the livelihoods to the adults, ensure access to education for youth, promote community health, and mitigate environmental damage.
The activities we are engaged in fall under the following four categories:

• Income generation
• Youth development
• Health
• Environment

How many people do you estimate that your organization is assisting?
PDA is working in communities which have a total of 124,600 people, including nearly 23,000 students.

What are your short- and long-term relief goals?

• Pre-tsunami livelihoods will not only be restored, but that the standard of living and quality of life in these communities will actually be higher than before the tsunami
• Clean drinking water and sanitary conditions are restored within the affected communities
• Sustainable economic benefit is delivered to communities
• Skills-training and micro-credit initiatives will help to create new livelihoods
• Health and education of the communities will recover to pre-tsunami levels
• Long term psychological health for victims and their families will improve
• Negative environmental impacts will be mitigated through educational programs

What, in your view, should the international community be doing to provide long-term assistance to tsunami-affected regions?
Most people we’ve encountered overseas answer that question with another question, “well, isn’t that the job of the international aid agencies and governments?” Governments can build infrastructure, but they cannot teach people how to make money; even after the international aid agencies replace all of the houses and boats in the Tsunami-affected communities, the fact is that these villagers will still be just as poor as they were before the Tsunami hit.

We need to raise the quality of their lives above what it was prior to the Tsunami, and we need to do this with dignity. The only way road out of their poverty is through business - through the transfer of skills, capital, and technology to the South. Taking the business approach - namely through corporate-community partnerships whereby rural factories and cottage industries are developed in the Tsunami-affected area - will make these villagers part of the solution rather than be seen as the problem. Imagine what would happen if a large multinational corporation was to send some of its staff to help in the communities; staff can teach simple sales and marketing, finance and accounting, organization skills, etc. Companies can foster, rather than adopt, a community and ensure that the quality of life for these villagers is better than it was before the Tsunami hit.