Sri Lankan tells story of faith amid war
8/8/2003 News media contact: Tim Tanton · (615) 742-5470 · Nashville, Tenn. This report is a sidebar to UMNS story #396. A photograph will be available. By Kathleen LaCamera* POTSDAM,
Germany (UMNS) - Selvie Selvaretnam knows what it means to lose
something precious. The Methodist lay preacher from Sri Lanka also knows
what it means to wonder if you will live through the next hour of the
day.
She, her husband, their four children and extended family
are Tamils, a vulnerable minority in a country plagued by a 20-year
civil war. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese majority outnumbers the Tamils 5
to 1.
An estimated 60,000 people on all sides of the conflict
have died in the war. In these terrifying times, Selvaretnam attributes
her survival to God.
"I mean what I say, that I believe in a
living, loving God," she said during a workshop at the European
Methodist Festival, July 30-Aug. 3. "I could be bitter, say that God was
a lie. My house was burned to the ground. But if anything is precious
to me, it is the peace we get as a gift from God."
Selvaretnam
is spending three years as the British Methodist Church's World Church
Development officer in south Wales and as a resource person for the
national church. Methodism was introduced to Sri Lanka by British
missionaries, and the now-independent Sri Lankan Methodist Church
retains ties with British Methodism.
A past vice president of
the Sri Lankan church, Selvaretnam is developing links between south
Wales and the North Sri Lankan Methodist districts. She is working to
make her people aware of the needs of people of color in south Wales.
According to Selvaretnam, that part of Britain has fewer people of color
than any other part of the United Kingdom.
But Selvaretnam, by
her own admission, is "a bit of a tough woman" and well suited to a
challenge. Though soft-spoken and smallish in stature, she does not
flinch in the face of difficulty. During long years when many friends
fled the conflict zone, she and her husband, the local head of civil
administration, stayed on, making sure that refugees received their
entitlement of government aid.
Her husband's predecessor was
killed by a bomb, and the couple knew that her husband would "walk with
death" every day if he took the job. In fact, when her husband's health
began to fail, Tamil Tiger guerrillas warned him not to leave. "'We need
you,' they told us," Selvaretnam said.
One terrible night, Selvaretnam's husband got up to answer the door and didn't return.
"The
panic button went off, and I just said to myself, 'Lord, be present in
this situation,'" Selvaretnam recalled. "I couldn't eat, or sleep. I
lived on water and for the children only."
After several
agonizing days of waiting, her husband was returned, though details of
his disappearance remained unclear. The family stayed another three
years before fleeing to the capital city of Colombo. A year later, her
husband died of heart failure.
In the years since his death,
Selvaretnam has continued to accomplish much, including significant work
on behalf of women and refugees through a German mission partnership
and the Agape Counseling Center. In Britain, she is the only South Asian
person on the national Methodist Domestic Violence Task Group.
The
eldest daughter of a civil servant and Methodist lay preacher,
Selvaretnam knows a thing or two about what happens when an oppressed
people feel they have nothing left to loose. She recounted a time after
Sri Lanka's independence in 1948 when the Tamil people looked to
democracy to address the wrongs against them. After riots in 1983, when
her family lost everything, things changed.
"This was the
turning point," Selvaretnam said. "Young Tamils felt like there was
nothing to live for, so they would go down fighting to make things
better for the young ones who came after." For the last two decades,
Tamil Tiger paramilitaries have waged their own guerrilla war against
the national government.
"What the world has to fear is not
weapons of mass destruction, but the despair, the impotent anger and the
hopelessness of those who have hit rock bottom," Selvaretnam said.
Selvaretnam
has paid a high price for devotion to service. Her children, now grown,
live with the effects of having grown up in the middle of a war zone.
She has been a widow for 10 years, and yet she remains thankful for her
life and mission. Back in Britain, when she is asked to preach on a
Sunday morning, she tries to arrange a Saturday workshop or special
event as well, so she can get to know local people and they can get to
know her.
"I'm very grateful to be here to say this Christianity
is not a fairy tale," Selvaretnam said emphatically. "God gives meaning
to our lives."
# # #
*LaCamera is a United Methodist News Service correspondent based in England.
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