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After living for centuries by the sea, tribes move inland
Issue 72 - 20 Jan 2005
CAR NICOBAR, India, Jan 25 2005: It's the end of a centuries-old lifestyle: after living by the sea they loved and losing all to it, the Nicobarese tribespeople are giving up, reluctantly designing new villages in the hinterland and finding new ways of earning money.
"We will miss our old homes, our neighbourhood, the sea, everything about the old village. The blue waters were always in sight," said Thomas Philip, chieftain of Mus village on Car Nicobar island, hit worst by the tsunami on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar.
"But all the villages have vanished, and we are now moving away from the seashore."
The December 26 tsunami wiped out 12 of the 15 villages along the coral-rich coastline of the remote island, where clear blue waters lap up the white sands.
For the first time since the devastation, journalists recently travelled more than 300 km on a navy vessel to the northern part of the island, not reachable earlier because of blocked roads and a smashed jetty. Those have been repaired now by army engineers, opening up access to relief supplies.
Fear of the sea is common in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and other countries struck by the tsunami, although some residents have no plans to leave their shattered villages, saying they have nowhere else to go.
The government in the Maldives wants to move people to so-called "safer" islands with higher elevation.
The tsunami killed 1,899 people across the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and 5,554 remain missing.
Precise casualty figures are being compiled in the villages, which look bombed-out with kilometres of scrap, shattered homes and twisted metal. Thousands of dead coral litter the beaches.
Village elders and senior officials of the tribal council inspected the site of their new village, nine km north of the old Mus village. Similar inspections were carried out by leaders of other villages.
Village heads are designing new homes, which they will build with construction material provided by the government. Fallen coconut trees will be used to build walls and supporting pillars. New schools, grocery shops, community centres and churches are planned.
Nicobarese tribal people, numbering more than 30,000, are nearly all Christians. They are the only ones among the archipelago's tribes who have had access to modern education, the English language, and prosperity. The rest include five aboriginal tribes that have a total of under 1,000 members and are some of the oldest surviving communities in the world.
Once village layouts are finalised, government authorities will lay roads and provide fresh water and electricity lines, said Philip, who is also the secretary of the powerful tribal council.
"We want a scientific way to build our houses. We have suggested the design. The new roads should be completed before the monsoon rains and we want the construction material two months before that," he said. Annual monsoon rains are expected in May.
Planners are changing some traditions due to the new circumstances.
Traditionally the Nicobarese "death house" - the graveyard - and the "birth house" - the delivery centre - are built near the sea, but away from the village as they are considered impure.
A mother and her newborn child cannot mix with the general population for six months, and people who participate in burials stay away for a week, living in the "death houses."
However, these building will no longer be by the sea.
Thousands among the Nicobarese, currently housed in dozens of relief camps on Car Nicobar and other islands, lost everything - coconut plantations, homes, and hoards of cash, which they preferred to stack in homes rather than keep in banks. The new villages will also take away their window to the sea.
"We like looking at the sea. We like venturing into the sea," said Nicholas, 19, who uses a single name.
Nicobarese love to fish, row for leisure or have fierce canoe races between villages at festivals that end with pig fights and the exchange of gifts to strengthen bonds.
"I like the sea a lot. I spent hours by the water. We don't want to live away from it, but we are also afraid," said John Abner, a plantation worker.
The tsunami has required many tribe members to seek jobs - something few did earlier because people lived off selling coconuts to a tribal cooperative, which sold them to coconut oil companies.
Life involved little work or physical labour. An average Nicobarese tribal earned some 8,000 rupees ($A170) a month, the salary of a schoolteacher on mainland India.
The tsunamis have battered coconut plantations, hitting at the lifeblood of the Nicobarese people. Thousands of trees lie on the islands, toppled by the furious waves.
"We have had a very relaxed life. We don't worry about tomorrow. But now we are suddenly very worried about our future," Philip said. -AP
 
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