Residents prepare to travel to Sri Lanka to help

David Kihara

Monday, Jan. 10, 2005 | 9:04 a.m.

Two weeks ago, 25-year-old Vegas Brian Thornton effectively quit his job at a local Internet start-up firm and purchased a one-way ticket to Sri Lanka.

For several months, he had been feeling restless at work and wanted some meaning in his life other than getting a steady paycheck and paying off his recent mortgage on a condominium.

When a massive tsunami hit the island nation of Sri Lanka and 10 other Asian countries last week, killing upward of 150,000 people and leaving millions throughout the region homeless, he decided that going to help in the relief effort would be the best course of action.

"I feel really bad for the people hurt by the tsunami, and there is a need for assistance," he said.

Thornton, along with four other Las Vegas residents, is scheduled to leave Las Vegas on Tuesday for Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, where they will join in the relief effort.

The group is part of a mostly Christian-based relief effort involving some members of the Rebel Christian Fellowship, a group made up of former and current UNLV students.

The group, which will be based in an orphanage outside of Colombo, is setting up what Thornton describes as a "Sri Lanka Strike Team," which will perform a needs assessment on the relief effort which they will then report back to other religious groups in America.

Thornton and another member, Sarah Turner, will also work at the orphanage to help identify the children who were left by parents after the floods, eventually creating a database which will include the children's identity for other family members scattered across the country.

"I'm not Mr. Good Samaritan," Thornton said.

Thornton was originally inspired to do some sort of humanitarian effort in February, when he was volunteering with a Christian-based group in Israel to provide assistance for people who had been wounded in bus bombings.

He said that his efforts in Israel were really unnecessary because of the high level of development in that country.

"There was a Starbucks down the street," he said.

Throughout the year, he thought about volunteering for some sort of humanitarian project while working at Pagetraders.com, an online stockbroker site that provides investment information. Thornton said he was responsible for creating the Web site as well as basic business marketing.

But he always felt compelled to do more, and that opportunity arose after the tsunami.

"I remember watching television right after the tsunami, and I saw Bush promised to send $4 million. He spent millions on his re-election campaign," he said. "But I think so many people are sending money, but they don't really know where their money is going."

The United States eventually pledged $350 million for the relief effort throughout the region.

Sarah Turner, a 19-year-old sophomore at UNLV studying journalism, is also going to Sri Lanka on Tuesday with the group. Like Thornton, she bought a one-way ticket to Sri Lanka and plans to stay there three or more months, depending how much initial work she can get done.

"I plan to stay until they kick me out," she joked.

Besides a one-week trip to Mexico to build houses with a church group, she has never been outside the United States.

"I think there are a lot of people who want to go and want to give but can't because they don't have the flexibility in their lives, but I do," she said, adding that she cancelled her classes at UNLV on Monday.

Although she said she was not fully aware of the type of relief she would be doing, she was preparing herself for the worst.

"I know it's not going to be pina coladas and palm trees," she said.

The group of five volunteers has raised money for their plane tickets and are looking for further funding from local church groups for living expenses.

Both Thornton and Turner said they are going to Sri Lanka rather than another country like Indonesia, where the death toll has reached 80,000, because they heard that the Sri Lankan government was much more friendly to relief volunteers than the predominantly Muslim Indonesia.