Aid Agencies Jostle to Get Inside Scoop on Needy Villages

Mark Stinson and the two other American doctors huddled on a beach and plotted their rules of engagement -- not for war, but to bring medical aid to an impoverished community so isolated that it doesn’t even rate a mention on most local maps.

“Remember, no medical aid is administered until we have order, so people all don’t come at us all at once,” Stinson warned. “Draw a demarcation line, and get a local official to man it so that we’re not seen as the bad guys. Then, we go ahead and treat people, one patient at a time.”

The tsunami killed more than 1,000 people here, one-sixth of the residents who eked out a living from fishing, rice farming and tourists drawn to some of the world’s best surfing. Many of the town’s homes were washed away, and 1,000 people were still missing.

Once connected to the island of Sri Lanka, Ulle awoke Dec. 26 to find itself an island. A bridge that linked the town to Pottuvil, a mainland village across a wide causeway, was also heavily damaged.

As the sun set on a humid evening Thursday, battered Sri Lankan military boats ferried residents and the first trickle of supplies. Nearby, snarling wild dogs eyed the mostly perishable cargo. One howled at the rising moon while another gnawed on a rotting goat carcass that had washed ashore.

Grim-faced men and boys stacked rice bales, bottled water and clothing on the edge of a washed-out cricket field. Many had lost their entire extended families along with homes and possessions. “This is not the right moment for grief; now is a time to battle for our own survival,” said one man who lost a dozen relatives who lived in houses along the beach.

Despite the international relief pouring into the countries hit by the tsunami, only a trickle, mostly from Sri Lankans, has reached places like Ulle. Separated from the capital, Colombo, by submerged jungle roads that are in poor condition even in good times, residents in Ulle largely have been left to fend for themselves.

This is precisely the kind of place Stinson and Neil Jayasekera had in mind when they left San Francisco on New Year’s Day on a personal quest to help victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

The Bay Area doctors, volunteers for the Los Angeles-based humanitarian group Relief International, took two weeks of unpaid leave from their hospital emergency room jobs to serve as an aid reconnaissance team for the agency, which helps disaster-torn communities around the world.

Stinson and Jayasekera landed this week in Colombo, where they met Vindi Singh, a Bay Area family practice physician who took a 10-day break from graduate school in London to assist in the effort.

Along with a few other agency workers, the three doctors joined the crush of international aid organizations converging on the affected countries. Many are arriving with money and aid supplies but with little knowledge of how to find the areas of greatest need.

The tension was palpable as aid groups in Colombo politely elbowed one another for the latest tips on which village might be without help.

Most are furiously researching the scene to write grant requests, hoping for a slice of the hundreds of millions of dollars pledged in foreign assistance.

Finding a unique locale with a host of needs might make the difference in whether an aid group can supplement its private donations with government funding, crucial for a small group such as Relief International, which operates on an annual budget of less than $10 million.

Representatives of most aid groups attend the daily meetings in the capital where Sri Lankan officials offer advisories on hard-hit regions. Others languish at hotel bars and conference rooms, prisoners of such unknowns as inclement weather, bad roads and bureaucratic red tape.

Stinson, 46, and Singh, 38, are veterans of Relief International campaigns in Turkey, India, Kosovo and elsewhere.

This is Jayasekera’s first volunteer trip with the group, but the 42-year-old doctor has become the group’s most vital resource.

Jayasekera’s father grew up in a small fishing village on Sri Lanka’s southern coast before he emigrated to London and the United States. Forty years later, the younger Jayasekera, who had once traveled here as a teen with his family, still had connections in the country, through his father.

To find a place to begin work, Jayasekera skipped the government briefings and instead called an even better source of information: his Uncle Mil.

Milton Gunaratne is a longtime friend of Jayasekera’s father, Stanley. After living in Los Angeles for 40 years teaching engineering at local colleges, he recently returned to Sri Lanka to run several businesses.

At Uncle Mil’s suggestion, Jayasekera and the other doctors visited a local television station in Colombo where mountains of aid -- such as coconuts, mosquito nets and water -- had come from Sri Lankans.

Jayasekera told the TV executive of his background.

“I explained that I came here as a doctor to give something back to the country that had done so much for my father,” Jayasekera said. “There were tears in his eyes. Then he got on the phone.”

The TV chief connected Jayasekera to another man, who told him about Ulle. The man, who was from the same village as Jayasekera’s father, said he had seen a Buddhist monk on television pleading for help for the isolated town.

The doctors left immediately, with vans supplied by the TV station, on a 10-hour drive through the jungle, always on the lookout for bandits that had attacked aid caravans elsewhere.

Along the way, they saw the Sri Lanka that Jayasekera’s father had described in stories: small towns with rows of chattering monkeys perched on rooftops; cattle that wandered the streets, nibbling fruit from vendors’ displays; and a wildlife refuge where elephants grazed, swaying in rhythm as they hosed themselves with water.

When they arrived in Ulle, where 90% of the residents are Muslim, they found a town in chaos. Even half a mile inland, houses were reduced to rubble, and there was a stench of decaying bodies. Many roads were washed away, replaced by pools of seawater that locals worried could soon turn into breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The waves had totaled the Tsunami hotel and resort.

But there were signs that inspired this village: In Pottuvil, a towering Buddhist statue remained untouched.

Still, more than 10 days after the disaster struck, only one other foreign relief agency, the French Red Cross, had found its way to Ulle.

Vernon Tissera, owner of the Hideaway Resort, with quaint thatched huts in a wooded setting, acknowledged that his hotel was no longer so hidden; the tsunami had destroyed smaller hotels between him and the water, turning his business into oceanfront property.

After days without any help, Tissera’s family contacted businessmen in Colombo who frequented his resort. One was Sivaji de Zoysa, who responded with water pumps, wells, shovels, even a tractor under the auspices of his newly formed group, Rebuild Sri Lanka.org.

Tissera introduced De Zoysa to the Relief International doctors, who may collaborate on a grant proposal: one group supplying the money and know-how, the other with inside knowledge of the local landscape.

“Sri Lanka needs this kind of teamwork,” said Jan Tissera, one of the resort-owner’s two sons. “This country can become a very corrupt place, but if they put their heads together, they can beat the threat of government graft.”

At a makeshift clinic set up at a village school, the three American doctors saw scores of residents.

One elderly man told Jayasekera, “My heart is in shock.”

On a break, Singh said most patients complained of colds, scabies and diarrhea. She also saw some chronic conditions because many people lost their medications along with their homes. She said the scene reminded her of India after the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat.

“Countless people would ask me, ‘Is there anything I can take for the fear?’ ” she recalled. She said she told them there was no pill for that; only time could heal the pain.