Doctor picks up the pieces

18-month-old Fathima Azra, undernourished and with an ear infection, needs all the help she can get from Dr Slushna Weeramuni. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Straining against her mother's arms, brown eyes wide, a tiny underweight girl is wary as Dr Slushna Weeramuni peers inside her mouth.

Her undernourished, singlet-clad frame makes her look half her age of 18 months. Fathima Azra has a glue ear infection and a high temperature.

Sri Lankan-born Weeramuni, an Auckland GP, looks around the steaming-hot crowded office at the Muhajireen Refugee Camp at Mattakkuliya for someone who can interpret her Sinhalese to Tamil.

Medication prescribed, and basic medical notes jotted down, she turns to the next girl in line.

It's not good news. Naseer Nalifa, 8, has chickenpox.

That's about the last thing needed in an overcrowded refugee camp teeming with children from 135 families, and just flooded by a tsunami.

It means Weeramuni must check all the young children, those who have squeezed in just to watch or who have been carried in by mothers and fathers who are not going to miss this rare chance of help for their sick babies.

Weeramuni is the first doctor to visit the camp since the Boxing Day tsunami. That's hardly surprising.

A place like this is not a priority even in good times, let alone when whole villages have been levelled and when 45,000 people are dead or missing across the shattered country.

The shanty town of tightly packed wooden homes with rusting iron roofs has been on Crow Island, near Colombo, since 1990.

It houses Muslim refugee families who were forced from the north and east by the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka's civil war.

They had to flee their homes again on December 26 when floodwaters turned the compound into a sea of mud, ruined their homes and scant possessions, and wrecked all eight communal, hole-in-the-ground lavatories.

Camp president U.K.M. Kamaldeeu, a justice of the peace, has asked the Sri Lanka Red Cross for help.

He says the people have returned to the camp but "are in poor position and fear".

Urgently needed supplies include lavatory chemicals, pillows, mats, kitchen utensils and school equipment.

But they at least have a roof over their heads, and in the aftermath of the devastation the needs of others are even more pressing. Weeramuni, accompanied by a Red Cross official, was the first to respond.

Now she is running a clinic, and the patients keep coming as a young man rigs up a fan to cool the doctor.

On Boxing Day she was on Waiheke Island with her husband, Simon Ventura, and children, having an outdoors dinner when she heard about the earthquake and tsunami.

Back at her Auckland home the next day, she watched on television and the internet as the scale of the Asia-wide tsunami unfolded.

The next morning, she told her husband she had to go.

Associate Professor Rohan Ameratunga, an Auckland clinical immunologist, followed his second cousin just a few days later.

"I couldn't stand seeing the images on telly and on the internet," he says.

"I thought I might be able to make a small contribution."

He admits it has been very distressing to see the devastation first hand.

For a week to 10 days, the two doctors have used such political and community contacts as they have to find out what is needed for Sri Lanka's recovery.

They are not the only New Zealand-Sri Lankan doctors working in Sri Lanka. One has made it to the sodden and devastated north-eastern region and another is in the flattened southern district at Galle.

A frustrated Weeramuni wonders why no other doctor has been to the refugee camp in two weeks, and who will see her patients next time.

Ameratunga has been gathering supplies. He has bought water-treatment equipment which will enable people to cope with the salt water in their wells. That water is needed for washing and cleaning.

For now, the refugees have sufficient drinking water and food.

One of the major problems is getting aid to those who need it most. As well, there is a lack of cooking facilities.

And there's a problem with middle-class people who refuse to join the poor classes in the camps.

Ameratunga is putting the finishing touches to a six-page report on the flood, in which options are detailed for the Government and New Zealand Sri Lankan communities to consider in their aid efforts.

He describes it as a call for help.

The report includes two core proposals - adopting a district and working closely in its reconstruction, or helping build a maternity hospital at Galle.

Both doctors favour the hospital proposal and estimate it would cost $10 million to $20 million.

Professor Malik Goonawardene, whose hospital was wrecked, already has a pledge of help from former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who nearly drowned in the tsunami.

In the meantime he's not sure what he will do with his pregnant patients, with too many to squeeze into a couple of wards at another hospital across town.

"We have lots of funds coming, lots of dollars, but they need shelter, Goonawardene says.

"The problem is not drugs or doctors but a lack of infrastructure."

The two New Zealanders emphasise the need for Sinhalese-speaking doctors and counsellors to smooth the work with survivors at refugee camps.

"It's going to take a generation to get over this," Weeramuni says.

Back at the refugee camp, she has created a stir by reaching into a box of medical supplies for condoms for the men.

The women are giggling.

Behind Weeramuni, a young boy has found a box and is turning it around, wondering just what it contains.

Weeramuni retreats to a taxi, exhausted from long hours of non-stop work and feeling the effects of dehydration.

She has treated innumerable ear infections, seen children with swollen glands, worried about possible tuberculosis and lanced a toe for a frightened, screaming girl.

"I asked her if it hurt, and she said 'no'," Weeramuni says of the fast-recovering teenager.

She has also helped to hand out fresh water, and baby formula.

Before heading to her parents' home in Colombo, Weeramuni will go to the Red Cross medical centre and ask that a full clinic be held at the camp within two days.

As the taxi pulls away, the condom boy's farewell is strangely formal.

"Thank you, it was very nice to meet you."