Written by Eilene Guy , Special to Redcross.org

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 — In the midst of a sea of human tragedy, there is a four-year-old boy in a tsunami camp who wants his daddy.

He knows his mother and brother are dead – killed by the massive wave that slammed into their hometown on the east coast of Sri Lanka. He knows his father is far away, working somewhere in Saudi Arabia. And he needs to feel a parent’s strong, comforting arms.

This is just one of tens of thousands of family connections that need to be restored after the tsunami swept across 3,000 miles of Indian Ocean coastline on December 26. It’s one of many cases Sara Blandford of Alexandria, VA, hopes to solve.

Blandford is an American Red Cross staffer with more than six years of experience in family linking. Now she is “on loan” to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the recognized neutral agency coordinating tsunami relief efforts in parts of Sri Lanka where separatists have been struggling with the government for years.

She and a counterpart from the British Red Cross are based in Ampara, on the east side of Sri Lanka. Teamed with two Sri Lankan ICRC field delegates, they began their work January 5 by contacting the local branch of the Sri Lankan Red Cross, where they were generously received. The local Red Crossers recruited six volunteers who could serve as drivers and who could speak both English and Tamil, to serve as translators.

“They are wonderful,” Blandford said of the volunteers. “They are about 16 to 25 years old and they are enthusiastic, as young people, but also because many of them were affected themselves. They had to run from the wave and they survived. So it’s been healing for them to sit with the victims and hear their stories and help them, and it helps the victims to be telling their stories to someone who shared the experience.”

Every day, Blandford, her partner and the volunteers head south an hour or more to evacuation camps in Akkaraipattu and nearby – at the very easternmost point of Sri Lanka’s east coast, which took the full brunt of the tsunami’s awesome power. “The needs are pretty enormous,” Blandford said.

At each stop, Sara’s task is twofold: to gather information from evacuees who are anxious to locate loved ones they have been separated from, and to offer a phone call to those who have not talked to their families outside the disaster area.

For those who are seeking a loved one and don’t know where they are, Blandford takes down all the information that’s available: name, description, where the person lived and where they were last seen, as well as the name and whereabouts of the “inquirer.”

That information is then crosschecked with data the ICRC has assembled from evacuation camps, hospitals, police and other agencies.

In cases where family members fled or were swept apart, this kind of matching can be fruitful. With more than 425,500 Sri Lankans displaced from their homes and more than 15,000 injured, a great many people have simply ended up separated from their loved ones.

Some unique situations arise, such as the cases Blandford’s colleague found in a prison in Batticaloa, where prisoners had no way to learn the fate of their wives and children. When those families were located alive, in camps along the coast, Blandford took pictures of the survivors. She hopes those images will eventually make their way into the hands of the men behind bars.

Tragically, many cases will not end happily. In Sri Lanka alone, nearly 31,000 people were killed and more than 6,000 remain missing.

In one of the first camps Blandford visited, she logged 43 missing person reports, most of them for babies. “The women had been holding their babies when the wave came in, and the power of the water just washed the infants right out of their arms,” she said. In fact, where she is working, there are far more parents bereft of their children than children orphaned by the death of their parents.

An inquiry fielded from a Sri Lankan ex-patriot in Canada yielded the news that six family members were dead. “That was depressing,” Blandford conceded.

Many Sri Lankans have family members overseas – many working in the Middle East. Tsunami victims are anxious to contact them, to let them know the status of their loved ones. For that, Blandford carries cell and satellite phones.

“When we arrive in a camp and let people know that we can offer them a way to call their family members, there’s a line right away,” she said.

“One woman had 12 members of her family killed and her sister is in Saudi Arabia. We put the call through and you could tell when the sister got on the line. The woman at my end, her face lights up, and then she starts to cry, as she tells her sister how she watched her family members drown. And the tears spread through the crowd. But it’s gratifying for the person and for the crowd, to make those contacts.”

Blandford isn’t new to these challenges and rewards. She went to Turkey in 1999 after an enormous earthquake, when family linking needs were huge. In 2001, when an earthquake racked Gujarat, India, she helped the Indian Red Cross organize its family reunification effort. When not deployed to a disaster, she handles family tracing requests for West Africa and the Asia/Pacific area through the American Red Cross national headquarters.

She is sharing her valuable experience with the Sri Lankan Red Cross staff and volunteers, who she hopes will be committed to carrying on the family linking outreach.

Meanwhile, she continues to gather information on cases like the little boy who wants his daddy.

As far as anyone knows, the father is working on a two-year contract somewhere in Saudi Arabia. The four-year-old, of course, doesn’t know where or how to contact him.

Blandford likes happy endings. She wants to draw on the resources of sister societies within the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and other governmental and non-governmental agencies to span the oceans and restore those family ties.