Long List of the Ailing Includes the Doctors Themselves

Neil Jayasekera, a 42-year-old doctor of Sri Lankan ancestry, awoke with a golf-ball-size abscess on his left leg that could have become dangerously infected. Wincing in pain, he sat in a thatched hut at a tsunami-damaged hotel as Mark Stinson lanced the abscess with a scalpel.

Used to running his own emergency room in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Martinez, Jayasekera barked commands to his friend of 11 years like a touchy back-seat driver. "Cut deeper," he counseled through clenched teeth. "Make that incision longer."

Stinson, who has worked alongside Jayasekera at their suburban hospital, finished his procedure with some doctorly advice: "I suggest you keep that foot elevated and not work today, but I know you'll do what you have to do."

Within an hour, Jayasekera and the rest of the team from Los Angeles-based Relief International (www.ri.org), including Vindi Singh, found itself in a rare situation. In the arena of humanitarian aid, often marked by stiff competition and spy-versus-spy tactics, the Americans were trading reconnaissance and supplies with a team from the French Red Cross that had set up camp just down the road.

Bringing their own box of supplies, Stinson and Singh were allowed to peruse a five-level shelf for medicine that their own arsenal lacked. They scanned the shelves like giddy food shoppers who had gone years without seeing a grocery store.

But in this Third World nation of 20 million residents, few plans go well for very long. The doctors were told that a military jeep supposed to take them the five miles from their hotel to Panama was unavailable.

Samal Gunaratne, the 40-year-old officer in charge of the local Sri Lanka special forces team, raised his hands and said he didn't have enough jeeps to spare one for the doctors.

Dressed in jungle fatigues, Gunaratne said his ability to cope with the disaster's aftermath was waning. He had worked largely without sleep since the tsunami struck Dec. 26. He and his men had discovered 200 bodies around the seaside town of Ulle. Most were buried right where they were found, without grave markers.