In Sri Lanka, a Hard Lesson On Road of Good Intentions

"The predominant line was, 'We're so-and-so, and we're the ones who are in charge, and if you want to do anything, you should do it through us,'" Coldiron recalled.

Against that backdrop, Byock said, the energy and enthusiasm she felt when she arrived in Komari soon dissipated.

During her first weeks here, she worked on an employment initiative that paid village women to weave roof panels out of palm fronds for temporary housing. But the initiative fizzled, Byock said, when the women decided they were better off collecting handouts while "sitting in camp."

Moreover, Byock said, whenever she tried to suggest alternatives, "Darrin's catchphrase was, 'We tried that and it didn't work.' It was a very scary situation."

To add to her troubles, she ran afoul of a local police official, who found her at home by herself one afternoon and made what she regarded as "inappropriate" overtures. Word of the episode got back to the man's superiors, who reprimanded him, Byock said. The official then turned hostile, demanding repeatedly to see her passport -- which she feared was a prelude to deportation -- and interfering with her work.

Signs of Progress

By late April, when a reporter visited, Komari still resembled a ghost town. Coldiron had returned to his firefighting job, and the three remaining volunteers were showing signs of strain. Unwinding after a long day's work, Lean, the nurse, wearily described how a 90-minute argument with a local lumber supplier over the terms of a delivery had reduced her to tears.

"At the moment I feel pretty burned out," said Lean, an intense woman with a warm smile that appears infrequently. "There are just too many barriers."

Lean expressed particular dismay at the tepid reaction of residents to the group's housing initiative. The team had offered to build simple wooden homes for refugees who wished to return to the village, provided they demonstrated their seriousness by contributing $50 -- in cash or labor -- of the $350 cost. Most preferred to remain in the crowded camps.

The missing teachers were another cause of frustration. Riding a borrowed motorcycle through the village, Ashton, the teacher, nodded in the direction of a temporary, open-air classroom, where children in white uniforms sat patiently. Their teacher was nowhere in sight.

"That just makes me sick seeing that," Ashton said.

But the freelancers could also point to signs of progress. After several months of effort, the team and its local laborers had pumped out most of the village's 450 wells. While contamination problems remained, the salinity in some wells had been reduced to the point where Ashton could mark them as "clean" in a color-coded computer spreadsheet.

Byock also was beginning to see the fruits of her efforts, which for most of April focused on helping landowners restore their gardens and croplands to productive use. Walking through Komari on her morning rounds, she watched approvingly as a villager and one of the team's paid workers strung barbed wire around a small plot that would soon be planted with donated mango and lime-tree seedlings.

"The way to start agriculture now is with trees, because they're much easier to watch, and water," Byock said before moving on to another part of the village, where she exhorted farmers to move quickly on a plan to form a new farmers' society.

Byock's troubles with the police official, however, were not over. During a meeting that week with the man's superior, she and her colleagues learned that the officer was due to be transferred as a consequence of her complaint about his behavior. Fearing retribution by the officer or one of his friends, all three decided it would be best if Byock left the country as soon as possible.

In a hotel lobby in Colombo shortly before her departure, Byock was philosophical as she reflected on her nine weeks in Komari. She expressed confidence that the work she started would continue, tempered with regret that she would not be around to see it. And far from being disillusioned by the experience, she said she would like to return to Sri Lanka, albeit as a paid development specialist.

"I don't feel like I failed," she said.