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In the wake of the world's deadliest known tsunami, generous donations flowed to Christian relief organizations worldwide. Throughout South Asia, relief teams began delivering aid even as they grieved alongside those they employed and supported.

World Vision broke a fundraising record, said Dean Owen, World Vision vice president for communications. Unsolicited donations (most of them made online) amounted to $1 million in the first 48 hours following the Sunday, December 26, catastrophe. He described the disaster has having "biblical proportions" and said that it may well require "the largest and most costly relief effort in known history." As of Wednesday afternoon, the regional death toll estimate exceeded 80,000.

Owen added that, in contrast to what United Nations humanitarian aid chief Jan Egeland insinuated in a comment earlier this week about rich countries' "stingy" giving, "World Vision has known Americans to be very generous."

The relief groups see this generosity as one way Christians can give witness to their neighbors in the devastated parts of the world. "As some of you know, the churches in Sri Lanka have been severely persecuted in this predominantly-Buddhist (70 percent) country," wrote World Relief Asia regional director Charles Moon in an internal World Relief memo forwarded to CT. "Will this be a time for the churches to return hate with compassion-and capture the hearts of the people?"

They will have plenty of opportunities to do so.

As of December 29, about 100 children sponsored through World Vision and two of the relief organization's staff members in Sri Lanka were missing following the tsunami that ravaged the shores of the Indian Ocean, Owen said. "Entire communities washed away" in the Ampara and Batticaloa districts. Estimates for World Vision personnel and children in other countries were not immediately available.

Among the survivors was a World Vision staff driver in Sri Lanka, who on December 29 was recovering at a hospital after physical trauma and the mental anguish of seeing his wife, infant daughter, and mother "wash out into the ocean." He had been driving his car "pedal to the metal" in a frantic attempt to flee the waves of water chasing them. "Unfortunately, the door opened, the car flipped over, and the ocean took his family," Owen said.

Among the victims was a 9-year-old girl in India supported through Compassion International, said spokesman Giles Hudson. The girl was visiting with her grandparents in Ramapuran on India's eastern coast when she was swept away by the water. The body was then recovered and on December 27 Compassion helped with the funeral.

Compassion's Colorado Springs office received 1,400 calls from sponsors inquiring about the well-being of the children they support, Hudson said. "If they had not been contacted, they should assume that their child is safe," he advised. "If not, we'll contact them."

"Three to four hours" following the disaster, some of the 5,000 to 8,000 World Vision's workers in the region had busied themselves helping the shocked survivors. "We started delivering the basics: blankets, clean water, food—be it cooked food or the dry, high-protein emergency food rations that don't taste very good but do the job of helping people stay alive for several days," Owen said.

Fortunately, World Vision was ready: it had stocked thousands of relief supplies throughout the region, such as tents that can be used by the displaced families as temporary dwellings. As of December 29, World Vision "had not yet run out" of them, but "if need be, we'll fly them from the warehouses in Europe and North America," he said.

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December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48