For Heller School Adjunct Professor Jehan Raheem, a winter vacation trip to a Sri Lankan beach resort transformed within seconds into an unforgettable encounter with the horrific face of the tsunami disaster and, subsequently, into a relief mission.A few of Raheem's distant cousins were vacationing in the south of Sri Lanka that Sunday and they perished in the incident. Some of his relatives on the country's eastern coast were injured but survived.

Staying at the Blue Waters hotel in Wadduwa, a coastal town 20 miles from Colombo, the country's capital, Raheem and his family had hoped to spend the afternoon of Dec. 26 swimming, having lunch and resting at their residence.

"[The hotel staff] were very careful saying they didn't want the hotel guests on the beach but they were unable to specify why," Raheem told the Justice in a telephone interview Monday.

"In talking to them I got a sense that their sister hotel 60 miles south had already been hit. They knew this by telephone but I don't think they knew the extent of damage that had happened at that time on the east coast," Raheem said.

Raheem, who grew up in Sri Lanka, recalls that the sea was calm and that many people, including tourists, were lounging unoccupied by worries about the weather when the security guards blew their whistles and requested that vacationers ascend to the top of the hotel for safety.

"The wave began to come...very strongly and steadily and by the time it reached the hotel...the water was four feet high but increasing very rapidly," Raheem said. "I have seen waves back home [in Sri Lanka] which have been very aggressive in the monsoon season, but there was nothing like that."

For Raheem, the tragedy drove him and his family to begin relief work immediately.

Raheem is the founder and former director of the United Nations Development Program as well as a former resident representative for that agency in Burma.

"Many of us immediately sent e-mails to the states because one of my daughters-in-law works for the governor of New York and the other at the University of New Mexico," Raheem said. "We also helped pack medicines and food supplies."

Raheem recounted how a Canadian immigrant to Sri Lanka closed her real estate office and converted it into a base for volunteers to pack food.

Raheem said he and his family both helped her and went to the coast to distribute clothing and water, as well as games to help children "lead reasonably normal lives."

But Raheem added that the tsunami's aftermath aided efforts to promote peace in a politically divided Sri Lanka.

"There is, I think, a kind of recognition that we can work together as a people when there are common problems, and if somehow the tsunami promotes the concern for what is common between the people in the conflict rather than what divides us, we might be able to work towards a solution," Raheem said. "A natural tragedy could not be the sole basis for solving a political conflict, but it could provide lessons and experience that could be properly harvested to work on areas of common concern.