UFO Info Week-End

At 5

At 5.30am yesterday Mark Shandur and Tom Armstrong were loading the last bags of rice and blankets on to a truck heading out on an 11-hour journey from the capital Colombo to the Amapara district – where more than 10,000 are thought to have been killed by the tsunami.
Two weeks ago the pair ran a travel company north of Colombo along with a south Londoner, Sam Clark.For those seeking a better quality of life, Sri Lanka seemed obvious. We have only been working in Thuney Thurai so far and we have found more than 100. Since the disaster, she has been staying with her aunt, along with her 13-year-old brother, Selvaraj But her aunt’s family is poor. Her forehead is knotted in a frown, as if she were trying to puzzle out why these terrible things have happened to her. She was 28.She avoids eye contact and often seems on the verge of tears but she does not cry. Just 10 days ago she had a happy family home and loving parents.

That is all gone now, wiped away in the space of a few minutes Both her parents were killed. The family home, with all its memories of her short life, wiped off the face of the earth. Now the best she can hope for is a place in one of India’s thousands of orphanages, a desperate struggle to scrape by an existence, utterly depending on the charity of others, a life shattered.
Nagapattinam is a town of orphans now. You can’t spend even an hour amid the ruins here without finding them. It seems every child you meet lost at least one parent on the day they call Black Sunday here.Revathi emerged from among the ruined alleyways of Thuney Thurai district, where wooden fishing boats lie on top of the rubble of the houses and the smell of the dead bodies makes it hard to breathe. A pretty little girl with ribbons in her hair.”I was playing at home with my brother when the wave came,” she says. “Mum and dad were at the beach waiting for the boats to come in, they used to help bring in the fish.

Then the neighbour came in, she said, ‘There’s a flood coming’ and grabbed my brother and me and took us out of the house. We climbed on the roof of a house, where we were safe.”Down on the beach, her mother and father were killed almost instantly, but Revathi did not know that. Revathi is alone in the world. They moved here six years ago and set up property and film production companies. Those ventures too are now on hold as the Podoros lead an aid operation moving from provision of basics to hygiene requirements over coming months.They have designed and built a lavatory that will allow human waste to be expelled from camps, reducing the risk to health.”We’ll get these out to the camps within the next few weeks,” said Mr Podoro.Gavin Major, from Yorkshire, married a Sri Lankan and lives on the island. He plans to use money donated from people in the UK to convert the fibreglass canoes he manufactured for the European market into fishing catamarans for those around these coastlines who have lost the equipment with which they made a living..

The money they raise is spent entirely on aid as their network of Singhalese friends are providing transport and manpower free of charge.And there are security risks. Jayantha Rathnayake, Chief Police Inspector of the Ampara district, told The Independent that aid vehicles were been looted when travelling at night.Meanwhile, Jerry and Pamela Podoro, originally from Canada, have had trucks of aid going out since early last week. “We know the language, the country and the people, so we were in an immediate position to do something” said Mr Clark.Within three days they had raised £10,500 simply through donations from friends and family. It offered stunning coastlines, a wonderful climate and the chance to piggyback on India’s economic boom.But now many who came to build a business under the sun are shelving those plans to launch disaster relief efforts.”When I first saw the pictures on television I felt numb,” said Mr Armstrong. The three businessmen delivered to them a van loaded with water, medicine and food and saw the thousands of others who also needed help.It was the moment their business metamorphosed into the Experience Sri Lanka Aid Foundation. It was not just seeing the devastation, it was smelling and hearing it.”Their friends were lucky.

“But it was only after I drove down to look for our friends the following day that I really understood. So what if they killed Haidari? There are another thousand Haidaris.”. Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister and a deputy to powerful Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, also voiced his support for the elections yesterday.At the headquarters of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, which tops a coalition of Shia parties, Ali al-Aboudi, a council official, said: “This incident will only make us more determined to continue the political process … Half an hour after the assassination, three American soldiers were killed in Baghdad when a roadside bomb struck their convoy. Another soldier was killed yesterday in Balad, 30 miles north of the capital, while a marine died in the western Iraqi desert.The attacks came a day after three British security contractors were killed in a car bomb blast at an entrance to the fortress-like Green Zone, the country’s administrative centre.Despite the continuing bloodshed, Iraq’s majority Shias and pro-American Kurds continue preparations for an poll likely to hand them control of the country for the first time in its history.