The babies from the Boxing Day tsunami - 20 years on

The 2004 disaster left thousands without parents. Former travel agent Lynn Stanier explains how after volunteering she vowed to never stop helping the kids she met in Sri Lanka

- Lynn Stanier

In the aftermath of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka and many other countries on Boxing Day 2004, I was the least likely candidate to volunteer my help. Footage of the waves wiping out beachside hotels where I’d once sat sipping cocktails round the pool left me terrified. I’ve always had a huge fear of the water since nearly drowning in the sea when I was nine, and the fact that we’d have been wiped out too if we hadn’t cancelled our planned family trip to Sri Lanka that Christmas haunted me.

My eldest son, Ryan, had other ideas. He had stepped in to help out in the office of the travel company in Sunbury that I had run for years with my husband. A few days after the tsunami had hit, a call came in from one of our agents in Sri Lanka.

They described how in some places, the water had come in more than 2km inland and how over 30,000 had been killed in Sri Lanka alone. The devastation was of a scale nobody could comprehend, they desperately needed help. Ryan booked a flight to leave the next day, and I knew I had to go with him.

It was to be a decision that would radically change our lives. We arrived to find rubble where familiar houses and fishing shacks had been and found people were living in tents, distraught and exhausted.

We were taken to an orphanage in Galle – one of the main cities – and it shocked us to our core. In the crumbling old building, there was a strong stench of urine and no running water or electricity. There were babies and small children everywhere; four or five to a cot, lying in filth and screaming to be fed. Terrified toddlers cried with arms up high, but there was nobody there to comfort them.