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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Guide Weather Subscribe Contact Us April 5, 2005 Called in relief By Robert Plain Ashland Daily Tidings Amid the rubble of a world crisis, Ashland’s Perry Prince is often in the middle of the mess. When the December tsunami that ravaged the coastal nations of the Indian Ocean and cost nearly 200,000 people their lives hit, Prince did not work to clear the debris off the beaches. But Prince, an Ashland resident of 20 years, spent two months in Sri Lanka helping the tsunami survivors near the city of Batticaloa deal with the enormous emotional destruction wrought by five powerful waves that tore apart their coastal village. Perry Prince, a Red Cross volunteer, interacts with Sri Lankan children during his recent visit to the tsunami-ravaged country. Submitted photo “The houses were literally washed away,” Prince said. Of the 5,000 inhabitants of this formerly brick-housed village located on a rural peninsula of Sri Lanka’s eastern shore, only 1,400 survived. Most of these deaths, 2/3 of the village’s population, were women and children, Prince said. Many men were spared because they were on their fishing vessels, safely out at sea. As part of the Red Cross’s Disaster Mental Health team, Prince has been around many terrible scenes in the world, including working in the aftermath of two Florida hurricanes and in New Jersey following the 9/11 attacks. In Sri Lanka, the work was similar — tragedy is a universal language — but the culture shaped different methods of intervention. Although he said he expected to find the Tamil people rife with post-traumatic stress disorder, what he learned is that mental health is hard to estimate from a different culture. “I went in saying I don’t even know what mental health is for this culture,” he said. “When you work with different cultures you really have to know what that culture is. Everyone was saying there is going to be so much post traumatic stress disorder because the enormity of the destruction was so great. There was terrible suffering, but that doesn’t mean everyone is going to have PTSD. Some will and some won’t.” Prince’s job was to help the remaining survivors deal with a post-tsunami reality — at least enough to rebuild their villages and get on with their lives. “Their society fell apart,” Prince said. “The mothers and wives died, the elders died, their religious leaders died. We were trying to work with the people to get them past their grief. Show them that life does continue. Empower them.” This, said Prince, “did happen.” By the time he was ready to head back home, the people of Batticaloa were taking charge of their lives and making demands on their government in a way that would have been mentally impossible for them only a short time earlier. “People went from feeling helpless to forming political groups,” Prince said. “They were saying this is what we want. This is what we have to do to get it.” Prince said the people he worked with began to rebound from their depression when they began to realize that, while they may have lost their families, the tsunami had, in some strange way, made the survivors into a different kind of family. “It made brothers out of them,” he said. “Not blood brothers but a different kind of brother. The tsunami brought them together.” DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Free Musick Downloads Slippers Women's & Men's Slippers Ceramic Piggy Banks heloc Calenders 2005 Calender 2005 Accelerate Weightloss Products Memory Foam Mattress tcg student loan consolidation home equity loans teleconferencing W2 Forms Tatoos student loans African Safari Conference Calls - $50/Month Security Systems diamonds Currancy Exchange Online Casinos Community Student Loans Tatoo Poker Games Homeschooling Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams