In December 2004, the massive Indian Ocean Tsunami hit the coastal areas of Sri Lanka causing a devastating impact on the lives of people. National and International humanitarian aid received in the ...aftermath was unprecedented. Among this was a team of professors and students from the faculty of Social Work, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, who conducted a summer camp as a social work practice project together with Sri Lankan undergraduates. The objective was to initiate a project for support based on an action research model adopting a short-term design built upon a needs assessment. While critically looking at the process of international support in the context of country's long history of state welfare and community support systems, the paper also focuses on one major lapse among others, negligence of people's needs during disaster interventions. The paper attempts to view this situation in relation to the absence of an established social work profession in the country and examines the applicability of an international framework and concepts of social work in developing academic and professional social work in a context as diverse as Sri Lanka.
The paper is a report on the findings of a research camp held in a village on the southern coast of Sri Lanka eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami. The camp was part of a wider project of ...collaboration between the University of Colombo and the University of Ljubljana, and its participants were students from both universities working together as a group. The report is mainly focused on the views and experiences of humanitarian aid as expressed by people from the village. They keenly observed the distribution of aid and saw irregularities and abuses that only increased their distress. Among other issues, they questioned the methodology that caused less visible and socially excluded members of the community to be excluded once again from the distribution of aid, and they particularly resented being forced into submission.
