Making Waves - Sri Lanka (2005)
Location: India and South Asia, Sri Lanka
Keywords:
Project Background
Photographs by young people living in Southern Sri Lanka, one year on from the Tsunami.
Just under half a million Sri Lankan people were displaced by the waves that hit the island’s coastline on the morning of 26 December last year. 217,000 of them went into temporary camps. Nearly a year on, many were still there and many are still there even now.
Save the Children funded PhotoVoice to run photojournalism training workshops near Matara, in the island’s southern province, to let children document their lives a year after the tsunami.
Over a period of six weeks professional photojournalist, David Gill and journalist, Annie Dare worked with two groups of young people. The first group of students live in the coastal village of Kamburagamuwa. Whilst all were affected by the tsunami, most of them are lucky enough to have their families intact and to be living either in their original family homes or new ones.
The second group of children is from Pellana, a large village in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka, who now live in a transitional camp for victims of the tsunami. Since being displaced by the disaster many Pellana families have been living in lean-tos, in a corrugated iron temporary camp the size of two tennis courts.
The young people from Kumburagamuwa visited the transitional camps in neighbouring Pellana for the first time during the photography project and shot their own documentary projects there. Those living in and around the camps turned the lens in on their own lives and the lives of their friends and families around them.