AMBALANGODA (Sri Lanka): Ruth Max looked around at the shambles the tsunami had made of her beach house on Sri Lanka’s southern coast and thought it just wasn’t fair. How could she rebuild their two-storey retirement home while ignoring the devastation all around her.

“I’ve known these people for years. They’re more than statistics. They’re our neighbours,” Max said in a telephone interview from her home in Amsterdam. So she and her husband started an aid group. It is one of many spontaneous efforts that surfaced after the strongest earthquake in 40 years unleashed an unprecedented tsunami on Dec. 26 that left 228,000 people dead or missing in a dozen Indian Ocean nations.

They emailed friends, set up a website and raised a few thousand dollars right away. That was enough to to put up 42 temporary shacks for the homeless.

Then friends of friends sent money. That led to more projects. The money is still trickling in five months later.

“As long as the money comes in, our circle of projects gets larger,” Max said.

To rebuild livelihoods, they gave 20 catamarans to fishermen and donated 30 machines that turn coconut husks into rope, a local cottage industry. Working through a committee consisting of their house caretaker, the fishing cooperative chief and local officials, they have donated computers to schools and a loudspeaker to the police station for a basic tsunami warning system, among other projects.

The stunning television pictures of a phenomenon few people had ever seen, and the sheer scope of the disaster, prompted an unprecedented outpouring of charity across the world. A lot of it — no one knows how much — is going to micro-aid groups who have been more quick to provide relief and rehabilitation with small, concrete projects than governments in the region.

Young people taking a year off to travel around the world began showing up in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka offering to help. Bill Crosby, a house painter from Mill Creek, Washington, flew to southern Thailand to search for missing friends and ended up selling the family home and using the profits to take food by sailboat to outlying islands inhabited by sea gypsies and illegal Burmese migrants.

Kushil Gunasekera planned on handing out scholarships to promising primary school cricketers at his small literacy foundation in Seenigama village on Dec. 26.

Instead, the former cricket club champion led them in fleeing the onrushing tsunami waves that killed more than 150 in the village. His “Unconditional Compassion” is now a tsunami NGO, rebuilding the village and creating a cottage industry in coir for people who before the tsunami were illegally mining coral and destroying the reef essential to protecting against the next tsunami.

In Khao Lak, Thailand, where many of the 3,000 people killed in the tsunami were foreign tourists, about 180 volunteers are working at a resort-turned-NGO, the “4kali.org Foundation”. The net-based NGO was created by the parents of 15-year-old Kali Breisch, who was killed when the tsunami swamped Khao Lak’s luxury beach hotels.

It provides money to aid orphans, repair schools and “help local communities find sources of income that don’t depend on tourism”, said Britny Must, of Franklin, Michigan, a world traveller who was among the first to arrive.—Reuters