It took a few seconds for the landslides in Wayanad to flatten homes and upend lives, but the trauma they left behind will perhaps take forever to heal.
A teenage girl who is among the seven kids who were orphaned overnight when the calamity struck Chooralmala and Mundakkai villages on July 30 last year and killed 289 people still struggles to fill up documents that require her to write her parents’ names. Prefixing their names with “late” doesn’t come easily to her.
“The girl, who studies at Navodaya School, was given a form to fill up. She left out the columns that needed her to provide her parents’ names. The teacher didn’t realise her trauma initially. The incident revealed that the girl is still in shock,” Karthika Anna Thomas, Wayanad district child protection officer (DCPO), told The Telegraph.
The Wayanad district child protection unit is helping the seven children pick up the pieces of their ruptured lives as they battle insurmountable grief. All of them have been placed under a kinship foster care programme, which allows close relatives to take care of the kids with government support.
Immediately after the landslides that turned their villages into a blanket of mud and boulders, the orphaned kids were taken to relief camps. But as their tragedy became known to the world, reporters and YouTubers began flocking to the camps for interviews, prompting the authorities to shift them to foster homes.
Two of the kids have since become adults. The youngest among the seven is a five-year-old girl who is being looked after by her paternal uncle.
Karthika said the little girl had forged a close bond with her three cousins.
“Among the three cousins, there is a three-year-old toddler who is the source of joy in the house. The five-year-old girl used to go to school with her brother, who also died in the landslides,” Karthika said.
Breaking the news of their parents’ death was difficult, she said. “We let them open up to us. Initially, we told them about the death of their friends before coming to the topic of their parents.”
As expected, they reacted in different ways.
One of the boys, a Class XII dropout, withdrew into a shell and got more and more aggressive. But Karthika remained unperturbed and understanding.
“Now the boy has joined a degree course at Don Bosco College in Sulthan Bathery in Wayanad,” Karthika said.
Another of the boys, an eleventh grader, had dreamt of assisting his father and uncles in their family business. Now, he is adjusting his life to the new reality as the dream lies in tatters.
The Kerala government is developing a township in Kalpetta to provide housing and support to landslide victims. The seven kids are expected to benefit from the rehabilitation scheme.
They have also received ₹15 lakh in addition to the compensation of ₹10 lakh for losing their parents. They get a monthly interest from the money that has been put in joint accounts that they share with the DCPO.
Wayanad district collector Meghashree told this newspaper that the Centre had also granted ₹4,000 per month towards the sponsorship programme for the orphaned kids.
“Apart from the state and central assistance, we also ensured that these seven children get private sponsorship of ₹3 lakh each,” Meghashree said.
Karthika and her team are also monitoring 14 other
children who lost one of their parents in the tragedy. Three have lost their mothers and 11 their fathers.