Six months after a mega-tsunami devastated many countries with coastlines on the Indian Ocean, 18 University of Pennsylvania students arrived in Sri Lanka. Their experiences in the next two weeks would open a new world of opportunity for both them and the victims of the tsunami.

The trip was entirely student-organized, with the help of many student clubs, and a close partnership with the Graduate School of Education. The effort was spearheaded by Sumit Kadakia, a North Carolina native and business major.

All of you know that the tsunami that struck Asia on December 26th was no regular natural disaster. Though tsunamies are quite rare in themselves and the number of casulties was staggering, it was really the tales of tragedy that arose from the staggering destruction of livlihood and the ensuing political issues that really differentiate this event from any other natural disaster. It was this realization and an understanding of the magnitude of the event that evolved over our time of planning and carrying out our tsunami relief mission for the University of Pennsylvania.

The university's relief effort really started when Penn's president Amy Guttman decided that the role the university would take in tsunami relief would be based on education, and that the dean of the Graduate School of Education, Susan Fuhrman, would lead the University's tsunami relief efforts. Our trip began when I decided to take this idea of using students to actively participate in Tsunami relief work to the assistant dean of the graduate school of education. He introduced me to Simi Wilhelm, a graduate student who was taking the lead on Dean Fuhrman's tsunami relief initiative and we progressed rapidly from there. With their support and with the participation of Delta Sigma Pi students, we began to actively recruit members for our exchange and also to broaden our support across the Penn community. Many organizations including the Singapore Club, Asian Student Union, and Habitat to Humanity, to name a few, graciously donated their time or resources.

A key moment in our exchange was the discovery of our partner NGO, AFLAC International. AFLAC stands for Association for Lighting a Candle, and though there are some humorous stories on how we found them, working with AFLAC in such a short time period was quite a blessing.

Hopefully as you may see, the issues that we uncovered during our two week stay in Sri Lanka are as complex as they get. We saw everything from grief and corruption to hope and good governance. I hope that this website gives you a small insight into the disaster that so many dealt with and what we can do at Penn to both help and learn from this.

-Sumit

The journal entries you will read in the rest of the site were written by us during our trip. They are unedited, and may not represent our current opnions. I took it upon myself to develop this page in order to facilitate an understanding of our experience, in the hopes that we can use our knowledge to help those still in need.

-Tom