Galle Hospital Delayed For Six Years

By Michael Hardy

On December 26, 2004, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl watched the tsunami waves roll in from the third floor balcony of his hotel in Thalpe, outside of Galle, where he was vacationing. Stranded in the hotel, the main road impassable, Kohl had to be rescued by a Sri Lanka Air Force helicopter, which airlifted him to Katukurunda airfield south of Colombo. On the same day, the patients of the Mahamodara Maternity Hospital in Galle were evacuated just in time to escape the tsunami’s second, more powerful wave.

Although the mothers and children survived, the hospital didn’t. The venerable Mahamodara had been Galle’s maternity hospital since the 1940s. Now that it was gone, mothers were forced to go to the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, which quickly became overwhelmed and overcrowded.

Kohl never forgot the devastation he witnessed in the south of Sri Lanka. After hearing about the destruction of Mahamodara Hospital, Kohl directed his charitable organisation, The Helmut Kohl Foundation, to provide 9 million euros to build a modern, new maternity hospital in Galle about nine miles inland from the original one.

On the first anniversary of the tsunami, workers broke ground on the new hospital and quickly set to work laying the foundation of what the Germans promised would be a state-of-the-art hospital for the people of Galle.

But now, more than six years later, a concrete slab is all that exists of the promised maternity hospital and Galle residents are growing cynical about the project. Enormous cranes from Singapore and expensive construction equipment can still be seen at the construction site, but no work has taken place for 18 months. Writing to an English daily in November, 2009, civil engineer Tissa de Silva complained about broken promises:

“The dream of a new maternity hospital among the mothers of Southern Province, which was born immediately after the tsunami of 2004, today stands still only as a dream for future mothers and the children to be born,” de Silva wrote. “For five long years since the forced evacuation of mothers from Mahamodara on the morning of December 26, 2004 they are housed in overcrowded wards at Karapitiya, at much inconvenience to the magnificent staff of nurses and doctors of Sri Lanka who serve them with such dedication. The ‘Uplift of the quality of Maternity and Children’s Healthcare’ promised by the Germans to Minister Nimal Siripala is to still come.” De Silva goes on to accuse the German government of withholding funding for the hospital because of the civil war.

The reality is otherwise.

How is it possible that no maternity hospital has been built six years after the Helmut Kohl Foundation donated Rs. 3,600 million for the project? As The Sunday Leader discovered in its exclusive investigation, the answer lies in a combination of incompetence, mismanagement, poor communication, and short-sighted planning.

The story begins in 2005, when the Helmut Kohl Foundation approached the Sri Lankan government with a proposal to fund and oversee a new maternity hospital in Galle.

According to Regina van Ahn, the deputy spokesperson of the German Embassy, an MOU was signed between the Foundation and the government stipulating that the government would provide the Foundation with land north of Galle, next to Karapitiya Hospital. Senok Trade Combine was hired as the building contractor, and German engineers were dispatched to oversee the project.

The first problem arose when the government, at the last moment, decided to provide the Foundation with a different piece of land than originally agreed on. President of Senok, Noel Selvanayagam told The Sunday Leader that the new land was in much worse condition than the original property. Because of the ‘bad’ land, Senok was forced to build a deeper and more expensive foundation than it had originally anticipated.
“We were forced to move to land which was very, very poor,” Selvanayagam said.

“There was sludge, there was mud, there were rocks. The German engineers designed a type of foundation which required over 300 piles, some going as deep as 50 meters. I don’t think there is any building this size in the country with 300 piles.” Selvanayagam estimated that the poor land increased the cost of the foundation by around 50 percent.

In 2007-2008, as the foundation was being completed, the world prices for steel, sand, and cement suddenly skyrocketed, bloating costs even further. In the end, the concrete foundation ate up around 5.9 million euros, a substantial chunk of the total budget.

Selvanayagam refuses to take responsibility for the cost overruns, blaming the poor land and the German engineers who designed and oversaw the construction project.

“I can’t take responsibility for cost overruns, because the prices went up all over the world,” Selvanayagam said. “We informed the Germans about the higher prices right from the start. We were just a contractor for the Foundation, supervised and managed by the Foundation. We were given a set of tasks we had to carry out. We were completely controlled by German engineers. We informed the government about the bad land, and the Foundation’s engineers knew about it from day one.”

When the Foundation learned how much of their money had been spent on the hospital’s foundation, they balked, refusing to pay Senok any more money and shutting down the construction site. Van Ahn, the spokesperson for the German Embassy, would only say that the project was put on hold due to cost overruns.

“Due to the rising construction costs the work had to be interrupted, and a continuation at this date is not possible,” van Ahn said. “Right now the hospital is at a standstill, but the Foundation wants to finish it. All the money has not been spent yet.” Van Ahn was quick to clarify that the German government is not involved in the project except as a mediator between the Foundation and the Sri Lankan government. “This is money collected by German businessmen and the Rotarians — there’s no public money in this project,” she said.

While the Germans have implicitly blamed Senok for the construction delays, Selvanayagam says that he is ready to resume construction as soon as the Foundation raises the necessary money. He said that Senok was forced to borrow 2.5 million euros for sophisticated equipment, which currently sits unused at the construction site, waiting for an influx of cash. For 18 months Selvanayagam has asked the Foundation to reimburse him for this expenditure, without success. “I am really, really mad because for a year and a half I have been asking and begging the Germans for our money,” he said.

“Our equipment is still standing there, and we have still not received a positive answer.”
In October 2009, tired of waiting for the Foundation, the Ministries of Health and Finance asked the German Embassy to support their request for a concessionary, low-interest loan from the German government to finance the rest of the project.

According to van Ahn, the request is currently under review in Germany, and she expects a decision to be made in the next month. Selvanayagam seemed optimistic that the Germans would approve the loan and Senok would be able to complete the hospital. “With what I have been told I’m quite hopeful that in the next two months there will be an agreement from the German government on a loan,” he said.

While the people of Galle wait for Sri Lanka and Germany to decide the fate of the new hospital, plans are underway to rebuild the old Mahamodara Maternity Hospital. On February 8, a ceremony was held at Mahamodara to mark the donation of 15 tonnes of medical equipment, worth Rs. 32.6 million, by the Rotary Clubs of Germany. The equipment will equip three new delivering rooms and four new operating theatres. Ironically, the Helmut Kohl Foundation itself is donating 100,000 euros (Rs. 16.3 million) to renovate the hospital it promised six years ago to replace. The Rotary Clubs of Germany and Sri Lanka have promised Rs. 51.75 million more in May, and the entire hospital is expected to reopen in December.

Since the Helmut Kohl Foundation’s initial announcement in 2005 that it would build a state-of-the-art maternity hospital to replace Mahamodara, the mothers of Galle have waited and waited for the hospital to appear. Now, it seems that they will be using Mahamodara again before the hospital is finished, raising questions about whether the new hospital was necessary in the first place. For six years Mahamodara was neglected because everyone expected that a new maternity hospital would make Mahamodara obsolete, but now it seems like Mahamodara will once again be the cradle of Southern Sri Lanka.

The Foundation’s donation of money to help rebuild Mahamodara amounts to an admission of defeat, an admission that the grand plans it launched in the aftermath of the tsunami have come to naught. The new hospital might in the end get built, but the people of Galle are through waiting. They have learned not to trust foreign agencies to build their hospitals for them, and are prepared to take matters into their own hands. New hospital or not, life goes on and babies continue to be born. The people of Galle seem to have decided that it’s better to have an old, imperfect maternity hospital than to wait forever for a state-of-the-art dream.