How one woman inspired a Yorkshire village to help a Sri Lankan community still devastated by the ts

ON the sparkling Indian Ocean, some distance from a palm tree-lined beach, a boat bobs up and down. Inside, three fishermen gather in the nets, hoping for a good catch.

This idyllic scene is taking place half a planet away. So the name of the boat is strikingly incongruous. It is called "Stillington, England".

To discover why a Sri Lankan fishing vessel has taken its name from a North Yorkshire village, we have to travel back more than a year and join the holiday of Rachael Taylor, a York care worker for Mencap.

To help her recovery from illness, Rachael had flown out to Sri Lanka with her mum Penny Abbey and her son Jack, then aged two. They found the beaches idyllic, and the people as warm as the weather.

One day Jack ran into a jewellery shop in the village of Weligama, on the south-west coast of the island, and his mum followed. It was a fateful moment.

"I had trouble getting them out - because love had triumphed," says Penny, a cookery writer and tutor.

Rachael had been swept off her feet by the jeweller, Fahrath. They saw each other regularly during the rest of the holiday. When she flew out to see him again last September, they decided to get married.

The wedding was set for early January. A lot happened in the intervening weeks: Fahrath came to York, made new friends and played cricket for Dringhouses; Rachael planned for her new life on another continent.

Then, shortly before the wedding, the Boxing Day tsunami struck. Rachael had not yet travelled back to Sri Lanka, and Penny was at home in Stillington when the news came through. She later got a first hand account of the horror from Fahrath.

"The sea is very blue. The first two waves came in like waves, and went out.

"The last wave was like tar, because of the volcanic debris from the quake. It came as a wall of water, straight down. Corpses were literally dropping by him."

Houses were reduced to matchsticks. Half of the village was destroyed. "Then it sucked away a lot of the light things - cooking pots, bikes, boats."

Children were orphaned, whole families were lost. Fahrath survived.

"Rachael went out not knowing what to expect, not even knowing if she was going to get married," says Penny.

The ceremony went ahead, but it was very different than planned. "Normally you invite everybody, people have a good meal.

"Obviously they couldn't do that out of respect.

"What the mosque asked them to do was provide the money to fund a trip into the interior to find a cow. They couldn't find one. What they got was two calves, which fed 500 tsunami victims."

More than 3,500 homeless people were sleeping in the mosque. Penny decided she could not go out there and expect someone to give up a bed for her and so never saw her daughter's wedding.

Nevertheless, the family realised how lucky they were. "The water stopped 400 metres from Rachael's house," says Penny. "The chap she bought it from, he bought a house nearer the sea - and lost it."

The disaster galvanised the world. Soon millions of pounds were pouring in to the appeal funds as those whose comfortable Christmases were shaken by the scenes of devastation did their best to help.

It is now seven months since the giant wave struck. The appeals closed weeks ago. You would expect the rebuilding work to be all but finished, the affected communities to be back on their feet.

That is not the case in Weligama, or other parts of Sri Lanka hit by the tsunami. People have enough food, and those made homeless have basic shelter; there are "a lot of tents: Japanese, English, Red Cross tents," reports Penny. "But they have nothing within these tents. This is why they asked for chairs.

"They are depending on people for food when what they need is work."

The tourist industry has been wrecked. No one is going to Sri Lanka. Yet the hotels are among the buildings to have been quickly reconstructed, to higher standards than before. Even though the likelihood of another tsunami now is very remote - "it's the safest time you can ever go," says Penny - people are staying away.

During her last visit, she took lunch with Rachael at one of the fine new hotels overlooking a heavenly, white sandy beach. They were the only ones there. She urges holidaymakers to consider Sri Lanka again: you would have a wonderful break, and support their fragile economy at the same time.

Meanwhile the big question remains: why has our aid not reached the Sri Lankans?

Because the island government "can't organise things, because they are corrupt, because they have hidden agendas.

"A lot of aid got stuck with the government. A lot has not been given out.

"Each householder was offered £1,000 early in spring. It's August. There's been nothing."

Phoning from Sri Lanka, Rachael paid tribute to her new neighbours. "The people are wonderful, they really are. They have a very happy air about them. Things don't seem to get them down like in England.

"But life is hard for them."

The government "is feeding them, but that's all they're doing," she said. "It's absolutely horrendous.

"I just hope they can be helped in some way. They need things to help them. You need boats and nets and things like that to make a livelihood."

Penny Abbey is not one to tut and do nothing. She began a one-woman aid mission for the Weligama people, and soon all of Stillington seemed to be on board.

A coffee morning raised £560. Car boot sales at Wigginton raised another £465. No fewer than 22 sewing machines were donated. An anonymous benefactor left boxes of new exercise books, pencils and scissors outside Penny's home.

One woman made a donation, and "her granddaughter was staying with her. She split her toys into two piles and gave half to our tsunami appeal," says Penny.

"I would go back home and there would be books on the doorstep. It was incredible. People gave and gave and gave. It took them half an hour to load the van with the stuff that had been given."

That shipment left England on June 21 and should have arrived by now at the Sri Lankan port of Colombo. To avoid the delivery being impounded - the fate of so much Western aid - the shipment documentation is linked to a Sri Lankan firm and sanctioned under Fahrath's passport.

He will have to claim the container from Colombo, and expects to have to bribe the officials, but that should be enough to release the Stillington delivery.

"I can't wait for that container to arrive, for women to be able to sew and people to have something of their lives back," says Penny.

There is so much more to do, and that is why she is widening out her appeal to the whole of York and beyond. If a few more people can chip in, it will transform the lives of the tsunami survivors.

And unlike other aid campaigns, you get a quick and precise thank-you. Penny has a raft of receipts detailing precisely what Weligama villagers spent the Stillington money on, as well as photographs of them with their purchases: from plastic chairs to bicycles to a fishing boat named "Stillington, England".

"I saw it on the beach the other day," Rachael revealed. "My husband was laughing at me. I was getting really excited because I had seen the boat."

Penny added: "They refer to the boat as Stillington Village, England. I said, 'why England?' They said, 'we are proud of England."

As our panel shows, any donations can make a big difference. Penny would love to encourage businesses to donate enough to buy a whole boat. Who knows: soon the fishing vessel Nestl Rowntree could be sailing the Indian Ocean alongside the Norwich Union and the GNER. Such boats would allow many families to become independent and self-sufficient again.

Penny has not registered her appeal as a charity, saying the red tape would scupper its effectiveness. But she promises anyone who helps will be able to see where their money went.

"If people would only realise we have so much. These people need help and they need to be helped," she said.

Can you help? Then ring Penny on 01347 811132. If she's not there, please leave a message on the answerphone and she'll get back to you

What donations will buy:

Water pump: £20

Bicycle: £40

Three-man boat: £250

Set of fishing nets: £150

Nine-man motor boat: £1,750

Ten-man cargo boat: £4,000

Updated: 09:05 Tuesday, August 02, 2005