Sri Lankan community swings into action

3-year-old Sabani Perera (right) and Erandi Jayawickrama join other Auckland Sri Lankans for prayers for tsunami victims. Picture / Amos Chapple

Sri Lankans living in Auckland are forgoing traditional New Year's Eve celebrations tonight to concentrate on fundraising for disaster survivors.

Doctors from the expatriate community have placed orders for about $26,000 of medicines and bandages to take back to Sri Lanka to help stave off disease among the tens of thousands of their compatriots left homeless by the Boxing Day tsunamis.

Others of Auckland's several thousand Sri Lankans have started packing essential household goods and clothing into a cargo container which the P&O shipping line has offered to carry free to Sri Lanka, and which Mainfreight will load without charge.

Auckland City Hospital immunologist Rohan Ameratunga is one of three doctors heading home to Sri Lanka to help to distribute the shipment of medicines, including antibiotics and painkillers. Another doctor has already left.

Although Dr Ameratunga grew up in New Zealand, and his relatives in Sri Lanka live well away from the coastal disaster zone, he gained leave from hospital duties to help to alleviate what he knows will be suffering on an "inconceivable" scale.

"It will probably be worse than most people could possibly imagine," he said yesterday.

He expects to be away for at least a week, before returning with advice for the Government on the most appropriate forms of disaster relief.

Auckland University student Mega Goonasekara, president of Auckland's Sri Lankan Youth Club, is concentrating on raising money after being advised against returning to her homeland because of health fears.

Her family has lost several houses beside the sea in Galle, a southwestern Sri Lankan holiday resort hit hard by the disaster.

Dr Gamini Ediweera, a semi-retired general practitioner organising the medicines appeal, is also from Galle and is mourning the deaths of a first cousin and that man's wife and two children in the disaster.

His wife, Rukmal, is helping to organise an appeal for basic household goods and clothing and has converted the garage at the couple's home at 2/20 Green Lane East into a temporary warehouse.

The Sri Lankan Buddhist temple at 11 Pukeora Rd, Otahuhu, is another collection point for goods to be loaded into a shipping container due to leave for Sri Lanka late next week.

Auckland's Thai community is also accepting financial donations, at its Buddhist temple at 99 Sabulite Rd in Kelston.