How we’re remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke & celebrating his centenary
Sir Arthur C. Clarke was born a century ago, 16th December 1917, in Minehead, Somerset.
He went on to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time and ‘The Prophet of the Space Age’ (The Times).
The Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature takes its name and its inspiration for its diverse definition of SF from him, and today I wanted to talk about just one of the ways we’re trying to mark his legacy both today, and for the future.
In his last public video reflecting on his 90th birthday, Sir Arthur added three wishes to complement his famous Three Laws.
He would like to see, he said, the take up of cleaner power sources, lasting peace in his adopted homeland of Sri Lanka, and evidence of intelligent alien life.
Now, the quest for intelligent alien life is a little outside the scope of our resources (although I am running SETI’s screensaver data processing app on my laptop, so fingers crossed!), and likewise while we’d love to do more to promote the adoption of clean energy in future projects, right now we have decided to focus on supporting a local education charity in Sri Lanka with the aim of honouring Sir Arthur’s wishes.
The charity we have chosen is Rebuilding Sri Lanka, and the following interview is based on a conversation with their Operations Director, Clare Allen, following the announcement of our ongoing supporting partnership at the Clarke Award ceremony, 2016.
Before that though, here’s a link to their Just Giving Page.
Please do support this fantastic charity with a donation if you can, and if you like, we’d love it if you could mention Arthur and the award in the donation comments. Thank you!
TOM HUNTER: How did the charity first come to be formed?
CLARE ALLEN: I co-founded RSL with a group of other survivors after getting caught up in the Asian tsunami in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004. We established the charity in response to the overwhelming devastation and horrific loss of life that disaster caused. Over 40,000 people lost their lives in Sri Lanka, the infrastructure was destroyed and many schools, homes & hospitals were damaged or washed away.
I have always maintained that this is not just a story about a natural disaster. It is a poverty story.
Vulnerable, impoverished communities all over the world are forced to set up home on treacherous soil; below sea level, on mountains and along fault lines.
The weak and incompetent governments in these countries fail to establish adequate building codes, early warning systems, rescue protocols or protective infrastructure.
When the tsunami arrived on Boxing Day morning 2004, Sri Lanka was shamefully ill equipped. Nature did the rest.
TOM: What has changed over time, and what are the main challenges you are trying to tackle today / where does the money go?
CLARE: Our initial response was directed towards emergency relief. We built hundreds of “transitional homes”, installed clean water supplies, built toilets, established resource centres, provided medical care, restored the livelihoods of over 1,000 people, built a village and two schools and returned 100’s of children back to school (by buying uniforms, providing travel bursaries for the displaced etc)
After a year it became very clear that the tsunami had affected many more people than those living in its direct path. Many people from rural areas had lost their jobs in tourism as the coastal hotel industry had been devastated. This caused a huge diaspora of rural people to jobs in the UAE.
Currently over 2 million of the 21 million population work overseas. Many must leave their children and families for many years at a time. This has caused huge poverty in these areas and great fragility within these communities. RSL discovered that hunger, corruption and poorly equipped schools were common in these areas. These were facts that had been identified, yet continued unmonitored. These communities were marginalised and living in crippling poverty.
RSL established food programmes in many of the schools. At one point RSL were feeding over 5,000 children every day.
Next RSL set about providing free tuition and establishing modern fully equipped educational facilities.
Today we serve over 16,000 children.
All RSL members work for free so that we can ensure that over 95% of funds raised go directly to support our projects in Sri Lanka and to serve these impoverished communities.
The main challenges we face today are building awareness about the critical importance of free education in Sri Lanka and raising money to support these facilities.
TOM: Is there one particular success story, moment or personal triumph you can share with us?
CLARE: A truly memorable time for RSL was when we established our first library in the former conflict zone in a town called Killinochchi.
It was incredibly hard to obtain the permission we needed, very difficult to source the books (in Tamil), a minefield to navigate the bureaucracy and a hellhole to live in. Eight of our staff slept on the floor of our library whilst we tried to set everything up. I will never forget the day when the Tamil girls who we had hired to staff the library came with food for the Sinhalese team. They all sat and shared food and stories. There were many tears and in the end everyone was hugging.
For a moment we had created peace in the north. A year later we established another huge library in Kaithady, just outside of Jaffna.
TOM: We’re obviously working with you to raise cash to support the projects on the ground, but knowing our hugely supportive the science fiction community is, if people wanted to do more than click ‘donate’ where might they start?
CLARE: It is amazing that people in your community have started to mobilise and raise money for these projects. Building awareness, sharing links, tweeting etc is also extremely helpful. RSL also welcome any ideas your members may have, and we are happy to come to talk at any future fundraisers etc.
Unfortunately we are taxed 100% on any imported goods/donations, so we must source all our books and equipment in Sri Lanka.
Thank you for reading and for any support you can give to this amazing charity.
They really do epitomize my personal favourite of Sir Arthur’s Three Laws…
Tom Hunter, Clarke Award Director, 16th December, 2017
