CSI Jaffna Diocese

The Wanni, a dream within our reach

By Christy Richards from New York

All signs that the Wanni will rise again gives a great feeling and the top priority the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India (JDCSI) is giving to its development has to be highly commended. The Wanni has a socio-economic and cultural history of its own and a unique agricultural system based on an exceptionally distinctive method of using water, and it is this resource that could also become key to the development of the north not just the Wanni alone.

Also if the Government of Sri Lanka goes ahead fully with the Mahaweli Ganga Scheme, the Wanni will become the passageway for water sufficiency of the peninsula, an ideal region for the development of fruit orchards, herbal gardens, livestock breeding, backyard barns and using organic agricultural methods for the cultivation of its famous vegetables and root crops apart from its rain-fed seasonal paddy. Vast areas of coastal lands unfit for agriculture could be planted with palmyrah, aloe vera and fast growing trees that can provide fodder for livestock and firewood as well.

Furthermore, it will help solve the galloping problem of our ground water resources and ensure continuous supply of fresh water in the peninsula. It is unfortunate the Thirty Years War nearly wiped out all these assets and potentials.

As a student of geography at Jaffna College and later as a teacher there, a small group of us led by Professor Luther W Jeyasingam have been regular visitors to the Wanni, met, talked and worked with farmers there and became quite familiar with the region and understood how it remained as the rice bowl of Sri Lanka for centuries. Professor Jeyasingam also did a study on the water resources of the peninsula and some of us as students were fortunate to be on his team. In later years he worked hard to set up the Jaffna College Technical Institute and the School of Agriculture.

We were also heartened by the work of Miss Lucy Hutchins, Rev and Mrs A C Thambirajah and Miss Elizabeth Baker in the mission field with the latter three incorporating their religious call into a service oriented agro-industrial project to serve needy families and young people. They were truly pioneers in this field and the challenges they were confronted with were many. I have often wondered how they, and what made them overcome all these and marveled at the faith that moved them.

In later years some middle class interests with hardly any devotion for the development of the people of the Wanni tried to acquire lands and be gentleman farmers who could never appreciate that even forests were also an essential part of agriculture. There were also NGOs who became involved but rarely if ever they had an idea about development and the needs of an agricultural population. One wonders how much the Wanni people benefited from such activities. It was soon seen with a couple of projects that large scale deception was practiced.

Fortunately, the arrival of a young and energetic pastor and his wife, the Rev Daniel and Mrs Thaya Thiagarajah as the new workers of the JDCSI quickly changed all that and their work among the people began to bear good fruits. They were accepted not just as a priest and his wife alone but as parents in the community as well.

It is certainly God-send that today, the same couple has returned to the Wanni as the leaders of their church bringing fresh hope to a community that was severely devastated by the Civil War. Bishop Danny Thiagarajah has an excellent understanding of the needs of the Wanni people apart from taking care of their faith and beliefs, and Dr Thaya Thiagarajah, in her own right is a psycho-therapist and as one who is needed very much at this hour in the Wanni.

They already have families in the Wanni that look up to them as their own, a kind of deep-seated and more profound adoption as family more intensive and overwhelming than legal adoption papers to that effect. This is very much a mission akin to what Miss Hutchins, the Thambirajahs and Miss Baker were able to do in the Wanni. The Thiagarajahs have an even greater challenge today. The development of the Wanni has to start from scratch at the grass roots and too many of its people have been hurt by the Civil War to an unbelievable extent. Thousands of lives have been lost especially its young people, many are orphans and several maimed.

The Wanni needs a rapid development programme and the key to it is education, not just formal but one that will bring together all aspects of education to make the children of the Wanni knowledgeable, skilled and enthusiastic to recognize the Wanni as their home and within a larger home of Sri Lanka and apply themselves to the country’s prosperity not only in economic terms but also helping to bond all communities as one nation.

As a student, I used to have such a dream, an ideal that one day the Wanni will be a great place to live in, empowered with a spirit of pride that he who cultivates the land and his work helps people is the real steward of the land immaterial whether the worth is ten talents or thirty. Just a few years ago when the Wanni was being devastated I wondered whether all that dreaming was foolish and just childhood fantasy. Today miracles are happening and my childhood dream becomes a distinct possibility.

My brother Victor Karunairajan used to often say that we may have been people of the Wanni in a previous birth and this is something which Professor Jeyasingam himself would have felt and readily agreed too, an observation that has nothing to do with our views on reincarnation. Both of them were the pioneers of the Jaffna College Agricultural Club and introduced the versatile Merry Tiller to the farmers in the area and also the Chicken Incubator for families in the neighbourhood; that was in 1954 and they demonstrated the Japanese cluster system of planting paddy. The members of the club did all the manual work including the transport of manure from neighbourhood homes to the paddy fields by bullock cart lent by one of the local farmers.

We sincerely hope that under the leadership of Bishop Daniel THiagarajah as chairman of the Jaffna College Board of Directors and Mr Noel Wimalendran as principal, Jaffna College will open several educational units, rather campuses in the Wanni, catering to all aspects of education and become an example of the kind of educational system Sri Lanka needs. We should not be educating children to send them to the West as many families are doing in Colombo spending fortunes on the so-called international schools.

We have to build a new nation and let us raise it out of the ruins we have suffered. We can do this and every home can be part of a dream that has to become a reality; it can be realized.

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