We seek your support, funds and resources to assist in meeting the ongoing and desperate needs of the people of the Wanni. 

 

After the self-destructive civil war that ended brutally in 2009, thousands of internally displaced people were resettled in the Wanni.  The landless were allocated pieces of land and the homeless were given small grants to build their own brick houses. Very little was done for these war-weary wounded people to rehabilitate them and provide them the means of livelihood.

 

If there is one word to describe the needs of these people of the Wanni it is poverty.

 

Poverty has many faces. We commonly associate a lack of food, clothing and shelter with poverty. If you happen to travel within the Wanni, off the beaten track, you will, like us, soon realise the extent of the all-pervading poverty from the oversized recycled clothes people wear, the malnourished stunted children, and worried and anxious mothers and their half-built houses, with some still living in makeshift huts.  Poverty also manifests itself through poor education of children, poor skills training, and poor job opportunities leading to a continuous vicious cycle of the poverty trap.  In setting up Well-Being (Sri Lanka) in 2016, we wanted to address some of the issues faced by the people in poverty in the Wanni.