Ecologist sets up orphans charity

IRELAND: The prominent Sri Lankan biologist and writer Dr Mary Toomey has set up a new Dublin-based charity for orphans of the Asian tsunami disaster.

The Sri Lanka Orphanage Fund seeks to offer long-term support to children who lost their parents in the St Stephen's Day tsunami by twinning devastated communities in Asia with towns and villages in Ireland.

"The spontaneity of not only the Irish but the rest of the world to this disaster has surpassed anything we have known before," said Dr Toomey, who moved to Ireland from Sri Lanka 38 years ago. "But the emotions will die and we need to identify ways of helping people in the long term.

"We can't save the world but we can give our personal time and our personal experience to help a particular community. If we take one orphan or one adult and say, 'As long as I live I am going to see to them', we can make a real difference to their lives."

Dr Toomey, a world-renowned ecologist and the author of various text-books and journals on biology and gardening, lost several relatives to the disaster. She "thanked God" her parents had predeceased the event, noting the village in Jaffna where her mother was born had been washed away.

"I feel like a Holocaust survivor. So many people were caught up in the disaster and I survived to be in my comfortable home. That feeling engulfed me, but I decided to get up and do something constructive rather than feel guilty because there is no point in feeling guilty."

Funds raised will go to orphanages run by the Sisters of Charity in Sri Lanka, an order with which Dr Toomey has long-standing links, having supported its work Tamil war refugees in the 1980s.

Next April, Dr Toomey plans to travel to the country with a volunteer team of doctors, nurses and physiotherapists. She is also twinning schools from her home community of Kill o' the Grange in south Dublin with devastated schools in Sri Lanka.

"It is estimated there are 20,000 to 25,000 orphans in Sri Lanka. We need to house them first - to get them off the streets from people hunting them for their own pleasure. We need to provide temporary accommodation, laundry facilities, so many things."

She had already amassed a "substantial" fund for such orphans and she was encouraging people to establish a parallel fund for children in Indonesia - a country she feared had been "neglected" to date.

"My motto is festina lente - hasten slowly. Let the large relief organisation take care of the immediate needs of rehabilitation but let's also do something that will last a generation or more.

"Living in Ireland, I am conscious of our Great Famine of 1845-47 and now, 160 years later, we are one of the richest countries in Europe. We must not give up hope. With long-term support, these devastated nations can come through better from this."