By David Snyder

Seated on a brown plastic chair, turning a rolled up paper sheet gently between his fingertips, Manikarasa wears the air of a college professor. Earnest and attentive, he is eager to tell his story to visiting humanitarian workers - of which there are few these days here in this camp for the displaced in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka.

Like more than 308,000 others Manikarasa – who like many in the country goes by only one name – has been caught up in Sri Lanka’s quiet conflict. In the last 25 years as many as 800,000 people have been displaced, all of them in the north and eastern regions of the island nation. As government forces swept into the traditionally Tamil-held districts of Trincomalee and Batticaloa in August 2007, Manikarasa, his family, and tens of thousands of others in and around his home city of Muthur were displaced.

“When they were fighting, we had a lot of difficulties,” Manikarasa said. “We went first to Batticaloa, then we came to Trincomalee.”

While tensions had been simmering as a cease-fire agreement disintegrated, the scope and scale of the displacement has been a challenge for humanitarian agencies like Caritas Sri Lanka, which has a long presence in the eastern regions of the country. As the displaced began arriving in Trincomalee and the neighboring district of Batticaloa, Caritas was quick to provide support in the form of shelter, food, sanitation, health, non-food items and other essentials to those left homeless.

Given the devastation of the tsunami that wracked southeast Asia in late 2004, killing tens of thousands in Sri Lanka alone, the efforts surrounding the current emergency in the east have been particularly challenging, said Rev. Fr. Francis Diaz, Diocesan Director of Caritas Trincomalee – EHED, Caritas Sri Lanka’s diocesan office in Trincomalee.

“One side was tsunami activities, one side was for those displaced by fighting,” Fr. Diaz said. “So we had to balance those two.”

Already carrying out a massive rebuilding plan in the wake of the tsunami – a plan that has seen more than 7,773 homes built or repaired since 2004 – Caritas was well positioned to respond to the displacement caused by last summer’s fighting.

“We are a church organization, but we have a very good network, so that was established before the tsunami,” Fr. Diaz said. “But after the tsunami it was even more effective.”

As fighting subsided, and those displaced by the conflict began heading home, Caritas has transitioned from emergency operations to long-term recovery and rehabilitation. Today, Caritas is working to provide temporary shelters, educational support and much-needed livelihood assistance and long term psychosocial and rehabilitation support to those who are returning home in the war torn northern and eastern districts.

But for Manikarasa and the more than 350 others who share the sweltering confines of the Hindu Cultural Centre, converted to a camp for the displaced, a homecoming is not soon likely. As the fighting continues, the government of Sri Lanka has declared some areas of particular military sensitivity to be high security zones, and will not allow those displaced from the sites to resettle. Instead, the government is seeking land elsewhere where the remaining 20,000 displaced people might live. While in the camp, Manikarasa learned from a district official that his home village of Sambur is in one such zone.

“The government said Sambur is a high security zone, and that only the government can enter there,” Manikarasa said. “There is a place nearby where the government asked us to go, but there are no water facilities so we don’t want to go there.”

As tens of thousands of Sri Lankans begin rebuilding their lives in the wake of the recent violence, many of them assisted by Caritas Sri Lanka, Manikarasa and others like him remain behind to face an uncertain future. Like many such camps, the Hindu Cultural Center is hot and uncomfortable, with none of the familiar pleasures of home. For Manikarasa, the options are limited.

“If the government says we can go home, we would like to go home,” he says, gesturing towards the red-painted concrete porch of the center. “But if not, then we will have to stay here.”