Flood Relief Program in Sri Lanka - 1

Flood Relief Program in Sri Lanka

So, finally, here we go. We share the great meritorious work we did in Sri Lanka with the help of mainly Malaysian friends and also from some US and Sri Lankan friends. We want to reach the flood victims ourselves rather than asking them to come to a place of our convenience. We opted the difficult way but we all felt it was worth suffering. The village called Ashokagama was half an hour drive from Anuradhapura and we had the support from a dedicated team of volunteers to distribute the flood relief materials to this village which was devastated by the recent floods in Sri Lanka. Our bus could only reach the boundary of the village from which point we loaded stuff to a tractor which is popularly called 'Land Master' in Sri Lanka. Then we went to a village community hall which was poorly built but still good enough for us to have an initial meeting with the village community. There were 67 families in the whole village, which was in deed blessed by some enchanting natural scenes, beautiful fauna and flora, eye catching paddy fields and every so innocent yet very warm hearted peasants. We started our journey by administering Five Precepts and conducting a brief meeting and then we reached each and every household with our tractor load of relief materials that we purchased for this village. Our committed volunteers took the whole day traversing under the scorching heat but everyone felt so happy in deed. We noticed the kind of devastation that took due to this horrendous volume of water which has swept through this village making the whole village been evacuated for weeks. Unfortunately one farmer who tried to save his cow had been washed away and his body was found several days later.

We gathered the information of all the villagers and distributed the flood relief materials as follows:

• Family packs
• Student packs
• Toddler packs.

Let me share the great merits that we accrued with this charity work. I am in short of words to thank the Malaysian Dhamma friends who voluntarily came forward to encourage me to organize this program despite their own country was affected very badly by the floods. Some friends in US and Sri Lanka too contributed to make it a perfect charity venture. Nearly 40 volunteers joined me in many ways than one to arrange the whole program.

We also gathered information regarding the rebuilding of their lives as a second phase of our support to them. We are looking forward to working on it too. These people need little more help from us to rebuild their devastated lives.

Apart from the village Ashokagama, we also distributed Flood Relief Materials to two Children Orphanages and a monastic school.

I take this opportunity to thank all those great hearts who were behind the scene helping and making this small humanitarian task a possibility. Please share the merits. May all beings be well and happy! (Sabbe satta bhavantu sukhitatta). Sadhu! Sadhu!! Sadhu!!!