Families the focus of NZ aid worker

Behind an unremarkable Colombo shopfront and up a dim stairwell in a third-floor office, Douglas Clark is answering his mobile phone. On the line is a Red Cross field assessor, ringing to say he can't find suitable warehouse facilities in the tsunami-stricken eastern region of Ampara. Clark talks him through his next task, then makes another call. He is trying to find out if the Red Cross has its own inflatable warehouses - large, marquee-type warehouses blown up by generator-driven fans - and has told his man in Ampara to find somewhere to erect them.

In the monsoon-lashed east, that will not be easy. One Red Cross worker two days ago had to turn back after a 12-hour drive to remote eastern villages ended with her wading up to her shoulders in water.

Aid distribution remains the biggest problem facing Sri Lanka almost two weeks after the Boxing Day tsunami killed or left missing 45,000 of its people.

Mr Clark left his Christmas in Dunedin to be in Colombo 48 hours after the disaster. The bulk of New Zealand Red Cross donations go into the international funding pool for humanitarian relief.

But the money also pays to get Mr Clark, a trained Red Cross field assessment co-ordination team member, to Sri Lanka to be one of a core of workers setting up the organisation's response to the disaster.

"We get here as soon as possible. And as soon as we get here we try to assess the situation. So this one was big. We had a picture of a pretty monumental disaster."

Red Cross already expects to have to keep a major operation going in Sri Lanka for at least a year. There is a silver lining though. The international response to the Asia-wide disaster has been so impressive that Red Cross is optimistic it has the ability to be very effective.

"The Red Cross focus is the displaced people," Mr Clark said.

"We're not into reconstruction in a big way; we're mainly concerned with the conditions.

"Our role is to try to ensure those people who are living in makeshift accommodation, or camps, or are homeless, or are hungry ... [that] we provide shelter, water and basic family requirements."

Sri Lanka has ample food supplies but the problem is getting the food to cut-off regions and three self-sufficient Red Cross health clinics now located in the south and east. The focus for Mr Clark is organising provisions for displaced families.

He's put together basic family survival and sanitation kits, including cooking sets and soap. Because of the need to localise kits, Mr Clark took to the streets with an interpreter to ask Sri Lankan mothers what they would want for their children if they were homeless in a tent.

But they won't easily get baby formula or feeding bottles - the Red Cross encourages breast-feeding.

At Colombo's main airport, a cargo dock makes it clear why dollars, not goods, may be a better gesture for donors. It is piled with chocolate-flavoured cereals, badly-packed boxes of freight and vast plastic-wrapped rows of bottled water. The Red Cross has its own mobile water purification plants.

A fraught Australian supervisor turned and said: "Would you tell people to stop sending bloody bottled water and woollen jumpers."

After one classic misguided gesture, a businessman's gift has had to be dumped in full. He had flown into Sri Lanka's steaming heat an entire cargo plane load of fresh tomatoes, lettuces and bread.