Construction, Conflicts and Learning
At my office at Swiss Red Cross I saw last week the pdf of a poster “Trinconmalee – 4500 Houses”, to be printed soon in Sri Lanka. It showed a picture of many colourful houses, which had been constructed in an area destroyed by the Tsunami of 2004. With the financial help of a “cash for repair and reconstruction“-program people had rebuilt houses themselves – an interesting approach to support them in the rehabilitation of their fully or partly damaged dwellings.
Click on the picture to see the whole poster.
Today I read a news in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) about Tamil refugees exactly in this area, who had to flee, hardly their houses destroyed by the Tsunami had been reconstructed. The article described the violence between the government troups and the Tamil rebels, and the refugees being caught between the front-lines and depending from the help of international NGOs, who are slowly withdrawing from post-Tsunami reconstruction.
It is a tense situation, and it seems that the long list of ongoing atrocities of the civil war, ongoing since 1983, won’t end soon. How much suffering will be needed until people find a way out of ideological obstructions and mutual suppression of opponents until a common ground is found for realising peace?
From a spiritual point of view these conflicts, however bitter they might be, are learning processes, which don’t end just with the present life. Suppressing opponents doesn’t solve the tensions. Unless you learn to settle your conflicts in a peaceful way and to integrate opposing viewpoints, the lesson to see the greater whole is still to be learned. It might take a long time, but Nature is patient.
August 20th, 2007 at 4:56 am
I wanted to subscribe to your blogs, but it does not let me change it to gmail. Let’s see if I get them.