Chaminda writes with this announcement of a local candlelight vigil and memorial service, organized by Vancouver’s Sri Lankan community:

Date: Sunday 2nd January 2005
Time: 3:30PM
Place: Vancouver Art Gallery, West Georgia Street, Vancouver.

The Sri Lankan community in the Greater Vancouver area is getting together at this time of national tragedy. Religious leaders from the Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim communities will be conducting services and leading prayers in the memory of all those who perished as a result of the massive ocean waves which washed ashore in so many countries in the South East Asian region.

…excerpt from: feeds.feedburner.com…

Keith Pleas Blog – Friday, December 31, 2004 Entries
Susi’s NGO (non-gorvenmental organization) on Bali – IDEP – was resonsible for much of the recovery work from the Bali bombing and the irony is that much of the organization around that disaster is being put to use immediately to bring relief to the Aceh victims. Lee Downey – one of the lead volunteers on the trucks taking in the aid was in fact the volunteer who managed the morgue from the bombing. He’s got a digital camera and 2GB of media, so there should be some “on the ground” images available soon.

Surfacing from the deluge of news reports about the devastation of coastal Thailand fishing towns, political sniping at the amount of aid pledged by the United States, and frustrated Western seismologists staring at flashing instruments without the phone numbers of anybody in Sumatra, one realizes that only certain details of the tragedy seem to linger — all of them being small, individual acts of heroism.
…excerpt from: www.salon.com…

Read. This. Page. It will upset you, disgust you, hopefully piss you off, but it will also tell at least part of the real story of what’s going on five days after the tsunami.

Excerpt from:
India Uncut
It’s five kilometres of hell, and it’s right here at Nagapattinum.

Kaviarsi studies — make that studied — in the sixth standard. Her schoolbooks lie a short distance away, and besides them lies a doll. The girl herself lies on a makeshift pyre on what used to be her home, her face totally blackened, her neck twisted upwards, the skin peeling off her legs like torn stockings. There is a large empty container of Pepsi lying just besides her, and four other bodies. And besides the pyre, towards the sunset, are five long kilometers of slushy wasteland strewn with dead bodies.

It wasn’t like this five days ago. We — me and two companions — are at a part of Nagapattinum called Akkarakadai, where a prosperous fishing community lived. This five-kilometre-long stretch of land was filled with houses, and had at its heart a bustling Sunday marketplace. The people here were well off — some of them had expensive fishing launches costing many lakhs of rupees. Then the tsunami came.

These settlements begin half a kilometre from the sea, across the road, but the tsunami swept everything away. Every single house was flooded away, all the way till the end of the stretch, and when I went there, I just saw one long expanse of slush. In the distance, there were pyres burning.

Dr Narasimhan, a man I’d wanted to meet, who heads a team of relief workers that has come down from Salem, told me when I called him that we had to walk into that expanse, beyond the pyres. “Walk towards the sunset till you find me,” he said, and we did.

It took us half-an-hour to traverse the half-kilometre or so until we reached him. The ground was like quicksand in parts, and our shoes would sink in with each step and resist our attempts to lift our feet again. We came across dead bodies on the way: a young girl in a basket, her limbs akimbo, and her face, with some dried blood on it, contorted in an expression that even Damien Hirst would have found too macabre. Three feet away from her lay a woman, with a frozen look of horror on her face, etched into an eerie permanence.

“In an unprecedented situation, you need an unprecedented response”

“For the next five kilometres,” Dr Narsimhan motion towards the setting sun, “you will find bodies everywhere. Only the distance you have walked so far — around half a kilometre — has been cleared of corpses. This is the furthest point till which bodies have been cleared. There is so much work to be done.”

“It’s five days since the tsunami happened,” I say. “Why is this place so deserted, why hasn’t all this been sorted?”

Dr Narasimhan sighs. “Sorted,” he asks. “All that the government has been doing is lining the streets outside with bleaching powder. They are not interested in coming here, they left this to the NGOs. And look at this.” He extends his hands towards me. “We’re doing all the work of moving bodies with surgical gloves made of latex, which are no protection against cuts and bruises.”

My girlfriend, who doesn’t read this blog nearly as often as she should, is Canadian so I post this here mostly for her benefit. :)

The Canadian government, until January 11th, will match any donation to major relief operations working from Canada.

In other words, you double the size of your donation if you send money this way, rather than by sending it directly to an affected country or donating in your own country.

Donations to Oxfam Canada, the Canadian Red Cross, World Vision Canada, UNICEF Canada, Care Canada, Doctors Without Borders, World University Service of Canada , Salvation Army, Canadian Food for the Hungry International, Save the Children Canada, and SOS Children’s Villages will all be doubled by the Canadian government — but only until January 11th.

Best wishes to everyone for the new year.
…excerpt from: www.williamgibsonbooks.com…