Homegrown Help in Sri Lanka

Start-up relief charity benefits from local connections

Savantha De Saram, a 31-year-old Sri Lankan lawyer, says that, before last December, he rarely left the nation’s

capital. “I didn’t travel out of Colombo at all,” he says. “It’s a joke amongst my friends.”

But the tsunami that struck five weeks ago has changed Mr. De Saram, turning him from a homebody lawyer into a charity leader who travels the island’s decimated east coast searching for families to assist.

Mr. De Saram and Kenneth G. McAlpine, a 34-year-old tea exporter, created a nonprofit group, Rebuild Sri Lanka, less than a week after the disaster occurred to provide food, shelter, and other aid to the tsunami’s victims.

Sri Lanka, a country off the southern tip of India, was one of the places hardest hit by the Asian tsunamis, with the waves killing 40,000 people here and destroying homes along 70 percent of the coastline. In response, Rebuild Sri Lanka and dozens of other new Sri Lankan charities have sprung up.

According to the Center for National Operations, Sri Lanka’s government agency established to manage the crisis, these start-up aid groups, while amateurs in the world of disaster response, have helped meet the emergency needs of many families and helped the country prevent an outbreak of disease.

But novice relief teams can also hamper humanitarian operations by flooding a disaster zone with too much enthusiasm and too little expertise, say nonprofit observers. What’s more, to the chagrin of established relief organizations, the new groups are benefiting from a belief among some donors that large charities spend contributions in an inefficient manner.

Channa Jayaweera, a London investment banker who is organizing a charity auction this month at a pub to benefit Rebuild Sri Lanka, says he passed over the International Red Cross, Unicef, and other traditional relief groups because he believes too little of their spending reaches needy people. “We know every pound we give will go into the community,” he says.

Fund-Raising Success

Of all the new nonprofit groups, Rebuild Sri Lanka is one of the most successful, raising about $200,000 in cash and materials since its inception last month. For a rookie charity, the group has been unusually savvy in its fund-raising efforts. It has allied itself with a nonprofit group in Washington, the International Conservation & Education Fund, to allow U.S. donors to receive tax breaks for their gifts. So far, the group has received about $15,000 from donors in the United States, and will garner more than $28,000 by auctioning a lunch with Adonal Foyle, a professional basketball player with the Golden State Warriors whose girlfriend volunteers for Rebuild Sri Lanka.

In addition, by using local connections, the group was able to outpace large charities in getting to disaster sites. While many international relief organizations were complaining about a lack of vehicles to carry aid, Mr. McAlpine borrowed trucks normally used to transport tea to deliver food and other supplies to hard-to-reach areas.

But despite these accomplishments, the charity’s founders say they had no intention of starting a nonprofit group when they heard of the tsunami’s impact; they simply wanted to help.

Several hours after the waves hit the island, Mr. McAlpine left Colombo to make the eight-hour drive to Ulle, an area in the country’s Ampara district, to deliver food and diesel fuel. Finding that the tsunami had destroyed the main bridge into town, he spent the night in a Sri Lankan military camp. The next day, he says, he helped organize fishing boats to work as ferries to bring relief into the hard-hit coastal town, where hundreds of families lost their homes.

While working on relief efforts, Mr. McAlpine met up with Mr. De Saram, a childhood friend who had made a similar journey across the country. As they talked, the two became convinced that they could best respond to the widespread devastation they were seeing by forming their own nonprofit group — or nongovernmental organization as most people refer to charities here — one that could move quickly and with few overhead costs.

“We wanted an NGO that gave 100 percent of any donation to the people, absolutely zero administration charges,” says Mr. McAlpine. “We do not claim any expenses, and from every donation 100 percent is going directly to the victims.”

Both Mr. McAlpine and Mr. De Saram work for the charity without a salary or reimbursement for the costs they incur.

Entirely Volunteer

To date, Rebuild Sri Lanka has provided food for more than 60,000 people who are now living in tents or makeshift tin huts, says Mr. McAlpine. In addition, the organization’s growing number of volunteers — mostly friends and business colleagues of the founders — have cleaned more than 100 contaminated drinking wells, he says.

While continuing to maintain their day jobs in Colombo, Mr. McAlpine and Mr. De Saram are making weekly treks to Ulle, where they coordinate their operations from the Hideaway Hotel, one of the few guest houses in the area that the water did not level.

At the hotel, Rebuild Sri Lanka plans operations with local business owners and members of the Sri Lankan army. The group’s founders keep in touch with other Rebuild Sri Lanka volunteers in Colombo and elsewhere by cell phone, sometimes wielding two phones at once.

At night, they discuss their efforts, usually over a bottle of arrack, an Asian alcohol distilled from fermented fruit. “It’s a lot of work during the day, and at night, we have a drink,” says Sivaji De Zoysa, an automobile distributor who joined the group shortly after it was established.

Despite the informal nature of these get-togethers, the meetings speak to the benefit a Sri Lankan nonprofit organization can offer to the disaster — knowledge of local customs and an ability to tap indigenous people or organizations to solve problems.

For example, Rebuild Sri Lanka has added “flavor packs” of onions, garlic, and curry powder, among other items, to its food aid to make it more palatable to Sri Lankans.

‘Noise in the System’

But while homegrown charities can provide an alternative to “off-the-shelf solutions,” they can also get in the way of relief operations, says Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Famine Center, at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass.

During the genocide in Rwanda 11 years ago, for example, Mr. Walker says, 480 new charities responded to the humanitarian crisis. The presence of the new groups made it even harder for established charities, whose expertise was badly needed in the civil war, to find interpreters and other scarce resources, Mr. Walker says. “There’s a lot of noise in the system when there’s a lot of groups on the ground.”

Something similar is happening in South Asia, according to a new report from Oxfam America, an international-aid charity in Boston.

Oxfam says many groups working on tsunami relief lack the appropriate skills. “The influx of money has led some organizations to flock to the region without the necessary skills or experience to deliver aid effectively,” the report says.

Oxfam has urged Sri Lanka and the United Nations to start an accreditation process. But the Center for National Operations says the Sri Lankan government stopped registering charities because it was inundated with applications. As a result, Rebuild Sri Lanka is one of many charities operating in the country without registration.

This lack of oversight at times has hurt relief efforts in Ulle. While Rebuild Sri Lanka has worked well with the military and local residents, the group sometimes lacked coordination with other charities.

During a recent trip to Ulle, Mr. De Zoysa was surprised to see Mercy Corps, an international relief group from Portland, Ore., distributing wheelbarrows. Quickly placing a call on his cell phone to Susan Romanski, Mercy Corps’s emergency coordinator for the area, Mr. De Zoysa expressed his confusion. “I was going to bring you wheelbarrows, and you just brought in a truckload,” he told her.

Working Out Kinks

Later, during an impromptu meeting at the Hideaway, Mr. De Zoysa and Ms. Romanski discussed how to avoid duplicating services. “I don’t think we need to step all over each other because there’s plenty of work,” said Ms. Romanski over a meal of dahl and other South Asian dishes.

Despite the mix-up, Ms. Romanski said local charities are an important player in disaster relief. Besides coordinating with Rebuild Sri Lanka, Mercy Corps is giving grants to another Sri Lankan charity, the Sewalanka Foundation, to help in the crisis.

“When you identify key people, it makes things a lot easier,” Ms. Romanski says. Both international organizations and the native groups benefit, she says.

The sentiment of partnership is embraced by Rebuild Sri Lanka. “Everyone who has come to the island comes with a good heart,” says Mr. McAlpine. “Mistakes will be made by some of the international relief organizations, but I am sure that some of the local groups will [make them] as well.”

Rebuild Sri Lanka’s founders do point out they are different from big charities. “We don’t have stickers on our boxes. We don’t care about the recognition,” says Mr. De Saram.

But while Rebuild Sri Lanka attempts to stand apart from established nonprofit organizations, history shows that many charities started in response to a specific disaster transform into more-permanent institutions once their original missions are completed. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, many nonprofit groups were created and continue to exist today, says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.

“Kobe just overnight opened the minds of people to these kinds of organizations.” Sri Lanka and other nations hit by the tsunamis may be discovering a similar new appreciation for charities, he says.

For Rebuild Sri Lanka though, the future is unclear.

“It’s not something that we’re going to do for the rest of our lives,” says Mr. McAlpine, complaining that his girlfriend has grown tired of his weekly trips away from home and that his tea business needs his attention.

But Mr. De Saram suggests that Rebuild Sri Lanka may find new life helping the country heal from its 20-year civil war between the minority Tamil population and the ruling Sinhalese people.

“There’s a lot of bridges being built here,” he said last month, as he watched a line of Sinhalese men unload boxes of food for 400 Tamil families made homeless by the wall of water. Mr. De Saram, who is Sinhalese, smiled at the prospect. “A good legacy after this will be for everyone to work together.”