A letter from Sri Lanka

EXACTLY three months ago today, early on Boxing Day morning, I was enjoying a rare day off and looking forward to lunch with my family at a beachside restaurant when the first sketchy information of the tsunami reached us. Within a few hours, all the Sri Lankan Red Cross branches in the affected coastal areas that hadn’t been wrecked by the wave had begun the relief effort.

During the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, a key role of the local Red Cross was to provide mobile medical teams who helped with search-and-rescue and treat hundreds of survivors, many of whom had badly broken limbs.

Within 48 hours, the first of seven overseas Red Cross and Red Crescent emergency response teams arrived - health specialists and water and sanitation experts who assessed the scale of the damage and the needs of survivors. A British Red Cross logistics team worked at the airport in Colombo to receive and oversee the storage and onward distribution of emergency supplies - complex logistics activity is traditionally one of the British Red Cross’s key strengths in emergency response.

Within ten days, health clinics had already been sent to four of the worst affected districts to provide medical care and water sanitation to shell-shocked people who sought help in the camps.

Over the last three months, the medical supplies we have sent to these clinics have so far been used to treat some 35,000 families, while the hygiene parcels we have given have helped 30,000 families to maintain their dignity. To date, 270,000 people have received emergency non-food relief items, including kitchen sets and shelters.

Help for displaced families will continue for at least the next six months until people can begin to move from temporary shelter to semi-permanent and permanent homes. The creation of permanent housing, restoring the community infrastructures and rebuilding people’s livelihoods are the crucial mid to long-term projects for the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and technical teams are already at work.

Other priorities over coming years include working with Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Health to rehabilitate 34 health centres in the worst-hit regions, which account for more than a third of the health centres identified by the government as being in urgent need of redevelopment. We will also build 15,000 permanent homes and provide water and sanitation to these communities and to the centres. We will also go on providing psycho-social support to those affected by the disaster for as long as it is needed.

It may only have been three months since the tsunami struck, but for many it is already past history. However, for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in Sri Lanka, it will be our future for years to come.

(The writer is head of the Red Cross in Sri Lanka)