On the ground in Sri Lanka
Claire Stewart, a final-year medical student, was working in Sri Lanka when the tsunami hit and had first-hand experience of the weeks immediately following the disaster.
Claire worked as a volunteer through IMPAKTaid, a grassroots organisation
set up by the Canadian Inlanka Group of Companies immediately after
the tsunami crashed down on Sri Lanka on 26 December. Their first shipment
was dispatched the day after the
tsunami.
In an email home, she wrote: “The destruction of life and property here is literally incomprehensible. When I arrived in Sri Lanka, I set out to find a family I met here 12 months ago… their village no longer exists. The only remnant of their home is a slab of concrete that used to be their floor.”
Every day, Claire jumped into a truck with two others to assess and help five or six camps. Due to overwhelming need, she also found herself responsible for looking after the medical needs of tens of thousands of people.
“They still didn’t have enough food, they had minimal or no medical aid, and they had absolutely nothing to do all day. We would make a list of exactly what was needed, starting with the most urgent, then drive to the local markets (which had also lost all of their business), buy what we could with our limited funds, and take it back to the camp the same day! This was the only way that these villages were getting any assistance at all, and our resources were rapidly dwindling.”
Claire said that $5 could be changed into 350 rupees which bought either 10 bandages, two cooking pots, four pairs of thongs, a bed sheet, two boxes of infant formula or five kilos of vegetables, and the purchases were then taken to where they were needed that day.
Since returning to Australia in February, Claire has personally raised over $40,000 for IMPAKTaid. She returned to work in Sri Lanka for a month during her July holidays with colleague and friend, Hannah Magree.
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