Some of these tensions also arose later. Only few tsunami victims could be convinced to adjust to the newly created life, the new social order. In early 2011 only 59 houses were permanently occupied, of which only 42 were actual tsunami victims. 12 houses were temporarily occupied and the rest either non occupied, rented out or sold to ‘others’ (as tsunami housing recipients call them). This created a huge divide within the community. The actual tsunami recipients didn’t want to have the ‘others’ being part of the community foundation as one villager said, “they should not be part of the community foundation, they should not profit from the tsunami… they are no victims! We do not want them in the village, but we also understand that some want to make money with their house rather than to leave it empty” (18, 04012011, SNJ).
With regard to new patterns of eco-friendly living, villagers adjusted or rejected donators’ ideals of integrating it into their economic and cultural life-style, which I briefly illustrate with the help of the composting and waste management issue.
Composting is mainly regarded as regressive and poor life standard as one villager said, “Composting is old-fashioned and too much work… especially here in the nature… I tried during the training but it smells and animals come. Now I burn my organic waste and from time to time other waste as well” (34, 122009, NK).
The second component, waste separation was also not realized in the envisaged manner, as villagers not only have another understanding of waste processing but also no one was willing to work with waste. The ‘Waste Management Committee’
officially exists and having discussions with its members it became clear, that
various obstacles and cultural misunderstandings of waste collection hinder a successful implementation. A member said, “Waste collection is dirty, it’s done by certain people. We do not have them in the village you know… no one from GHG wants to do this job, it is considered a poor job…” (22, 122009, GP). But it is not only the social and cultural interpretation of working with waste but also from a practical perspective waste collection is not an easy task to manage. Recycling in Galle District is organized on various levels – private and public – and to integrate one village into this complex system separately becomes a problem. Economically, to use private recycling companies brings profit only if a high volume can be sold and GHG would have needed to store the waste until a profitable amount has been reached. “We have no room to store waste nor money to built a waste storage…
its not nice to have waste everywhere in the village, no? We need a place or we cannot collect it…” (9, 122009, RS). Based on these obstacles the committee remained inactive and today most of the households burn their waste. One housing owner told, “There is no waste collection from Pradeshiya Sabha, so what to do, we cannot leave the waste no, so we burn most of our waste or some just throw it (pointing down the valley) look you can see, bad no? But what to do?”
(45, 122009, GP). The idea of an autarkic, environment friendly village did not work out, as villagers based on their socio-economic and cultural understanding were not willing to interfere with waste on professional or private level; waste is associated with a poor standard.
The above statements and examples are quite apart from donators’ imagination of eco-friendly, peaceful co-existence and active citizenship, although politics of inclusion/exclusion and adjustment are certainly part of liberal political life itself.
But the ambivalences that the whole process of trying to create liberal subjects and a model village based on a certain socialized knowledge reminds us that those who designed and established the vision of GHG had “forgotten the most important fact about social engineering: its efficiency depends on the response and cooperation of real human subjects” (Scott, 1998, 225).
Conclusion
“We the donors provided you with a new village, new houses and infrastructure. The foundations for a better future are laid… Now it is your responsibility to make the village a place of peaceful and prosperous coexistence…” (26, 072007, Donator C).
This statement taken from an inaugural speech of one of the German donators
indicates the fundamental logic of the vision of the German “model village”
in Sri Lanka: the engineering of a better future – “building back better”. The benevolent and generous act of giving, of building better, did on the one hand mean to provide technically solid and spacious houses and a more modern design of the village layout, from the donators’ personal experience. On the other hand the vision of setting people on a better path of development was defined on a larger scale: it meant to create new political subjects, new citizens that, in a way, would transgress the limited bounds of the mundane, dirty party politics as practiced in Sri Lanka. The vision was to ‘conduct the conduct’ of beneficiaries in order to implant peace into local communities as an antipode to the ethnicized antagonisms prevailing in Sri Lanka at the time of planning the project, and even today. In this sense, the project was designed as a model to govern mentalities – the mentalities of disaster victims to make them active political subjects managing their “own community” and starting to participate in politics.
What does the example of German Haritha Gama tell us? We could look at the model village as another example, of how visions and ideals have rarely proven to be translatable into reality, how utopias, which are a continuing currency of development projects and aid, are bound to fail especially if they are the utopias of outsiders. It could be understood as a miniature-modernizing project of the kinds that James Scott had in mind (certainly on much larger scales) in Seeing like a State (2000). And surely, even on its own terms, the model village cannot claim to have been fully successful: only parts of the houses are permanently occupied, the political life of the village is far from the ideals elaborated in the village constitution and considerable frustration abounds among those who accepted to settle in the village. But as Li (2005) suggests, that by looking “beyond ... failed schemes” it becomes evident that project participants find new practices and compromises “to fill the gap between project plans and on-the-ground realities”
(Li, 2005, 391). Therefore improvement schemes such as German Haritha Gama produce new forms of local knowledge and practices, they change and influence
‘the conduct of conduct’ but however not in the way as laid down and envisioned by the donators but as it is newly interpreted by its recipients (Li, 2005; Li, 1999;
Lewis and Mosse, 2006).
The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami was an extreme case of a natural disaster: in magnitude - 13 countries in Asia and Africa were affected but as well in its global solicitousness. No other disaster, man made or natural had and since then has ever evoked so many donations – private, national and international. These yield a high inflow of money into disaster-affected countries with its well-known shortcomings of mismanagement, high competitiveness and inefficiency. Also the
Tsunami highlights a new upcoming trend in international aid: privately driven and financed aid projects. Private donators with huge financial resources attract notice as partners in international aid, however donators in return demand their participation in concrete project planning and decision-making as well as in defining core areas of development. Even so private donators consider and define themselves as an antipode to the official aid ‘business’ the above case study shows; that the attempt to build better – producing governable subjects – is a source of power replicating existing asymmetries and deficiencies in international development aid.
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