I’ve never had an experience abroad that touched the emotions in the same way as the trip my wife and I recently took to Sri Lanka. To drive for 200 miles along a coast road of ruins is terrible – but to be able to actually do something for the people there was so good.
 | | Wasantha and Santha with their rickshaws |
BBC Cambridgeshire held a cabaret evening in February to raise money to buy two motorised rickshaws, or tuk-tuks, to help two young men from the town of Tangalla to rebuild their lives. I've since been asked whether the money we raised was really going to a sensible cause - and my goodness, it was. I can't remember ever enjoying a 'holiday' this much before. Although what we saw was horrifying, what we were able to achieve was very encouraging. On our last evening in Tangalla, Wasantha and Santha - the two boys for whom we bought the tuk-tuks - invited myself and my wife to a beach barbecue. We thought that sounded very romantic, and a lovely way to say goodbye. We didn’t want them to use what little money they had, so we provided all the food and drink, and they agreed to fix up the barbecue. They arrived at our guest house in their new tuk-tuks to drive us to the beach, and I remember thinking that this would be a night to remember – well it was, but in a very odd way... | "The tourist industry that remains in Sri Lanka has turned out to have a lot of heart" | | Christopher South |
It took place on the beach where one of the boys was living with his mother, who is about 70, in the shell of their old house, with nothing – absolutely nothing – left, at all. And there we sat in the ruins of this beach house, with a barbecue made out of rubble and a fire stoked by broken furniture. Now, what’s very interesting about our visit to Sri Lanka, is that we stumbled across quite a few people doing similar things to us – taking the money they had raised directly to the people that needed it - rather than spreading it around in the fairly vague hope that it would do some good. I like to think of this as the honourable side of tourism. You don’t just go there to get baked in the sun, over eat, over drink and go back home again. The tourist industry that remains in Sri Lanka has turned out to have a lot of heart. There’s a good deal of conflicting information about whether tourists should return to Sri Lanka, but there’s really no reason not to go. Even if you’re apprehensive about the coast – and there’s no reason to be at all – there’s still so much to see inland. Basically, if you were on higher land, you completely escaped the effects of the wave, but if you were unfortunate enough to be near the coast, basically you lost everything.
 | | A wrecked fishing boat sits in the water |
We also saw plenty of evidence that aid from the major appeals is reaching those who need it, although it’s a very patchy scene and there is some cause for apprehension about how massive government aid is reaching, say, the fishermen. The Sri Lankan government, using its own, and some international, resources, has promised to replace furniture and fishing boats but they very rightly say that you can’t just conjure boats out of mid air – they’ve got to be made, so that will take time. But there is a lot of extreme hardship. The number of nations taking part in the projects to rebuild the countries hit by the tsunami is staggering and we know that the aid is getting through because we’ve seen the tents. The British Rotary and the International Rotary were very much in evidence - there were hundreds of tents there from all over the world. The Sri Lankan government is also producing subsistence money for people who have absolutely nothing – enough for these families to live on – and they are promising to rebuild 40,000 homes. I was also in a house where I saw a Red Cross food box, so yes, supplies are indeed getting through. While there, I saw rice being distributed from Taiwan – this is an amazing international effort. The heads of the villages are in charge of distributing it to their townspeople and on the whole that’s being handled with great decorum. Although some of the large international charities have closed their books, I don’t believe that’s necessarily a sensible thing. The need is going to go on for a long time. Christopher South
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire | 
