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Rebuilding Sri Lanka
MIT helps tsunami survivors return home and start anew
By Katharine Dunn

In the first days after a monstrous tsunami hit countries in Southeast Asia last December, aid agencies and volunteers scrambled to provide urgent short-term assistance to survivors. MIT Buddhist chaplain Tenzin Priyadarshi, however, got to work on longer-term plans; he set out to rebuild permanent housing near Sri Lanka's shores, where about half a million people lost their homes. Priyadarshi, who once lived in Sri Lanka, is raising funds to support the effort through the Prajnopaya Foundation, the Carlisle, MA-based nonprofit he directs, and with the collaboration of the Sri Bodhiraja Foundation in Sri Lanka, a group he met through friends there. He also has the help of MIT students and faculty in designing the new houses.

But Priyadarshi will need all this support to surmount some looming obstacles. In January, the government of Sri Lanka announced it wanted to relocate much of the population away from the coastline. "Is the government [threatening relocation] for fear of another tsunami, or for tourism?" asks Priyadarshi, pointing out that it would be more profitable to sell prime seaside land to businesses rather than give it back to the people who have always lived there.

Priyadarshi and his colleagues used their connections in Sri Lanka's Buddhist-friendly government (about 70 percent of the country's population is Buddhist) to secure some land for new housing. Volunteers began building prototype houses last January; eventually, Priyadarshi hopes to build 1,000 single-family homes in a dozen communities along the coast.

To reach that goal, the groups will negotiate with the Sri Lankan government for more land--an effort that should be easier with the promise that many of the new houses will be designed to be more resistant to ocean storms. Researchers and students in the departments of architecture and urban studies and planning, as well as students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, have designed houses that will probably be made of wood and concrete blocks and raised a meter or so off the ground on pillars, creating space for water to flow under the buildings if a large wave hits. According to a simulation by engineers at Buro Happold, a design consultancy in London, in the case of a tsunami, the structures should be more than five times more resistant than existing houses along the Sri Lankan coast. The houses would cost about $1,200 each and would be built by volunteers, including the people who would live in them.