As it happens, Nancy Lindborg, the brilliant, vibrant president of Mercy Corps, is in Sri Lanka on a three-day reconnaissance mission. When I tell her about Lyn’s plan, she lights up with enthusiasm. It would be marvelous, she says, to make this trip the seed of another “Comfort for Kids” project.

Mercy Corps doesn’t often run programs in the United States, but after Sept. 11, it partnered with two New York corporations — JP Morgan Chase and Bright Horizons (a day-care center enterprise) — to provide “Comfort for Kids.” These were small packages containing morale-boosting gifts for children: colored pencils and crayons, stuffed animals and small toys. In large-scale disasters, children are often left to fend for themselves, as their parents (if they still have parents) manage the rebuilding process. Provided a few creative distractions, though, kids prove remarkably resilient.

Lyn’s idea of providing children with toys and games “is a great thing to do,” Nancy tells me. “And I’ll let you organize it.”

“Pardon?”

“You help take responsibility for it. Work with Lyn and decide what should go into these kits. Find a way to package them. And take a separate vehicle. We can bring more toys that way.”

Her invitation is at once thrilling and terrifying. But that’s what I came here for: to work with my hands, as well as my head. Luckily, Dwayne Newton, my lifelong friend and a gifted photographer, arrived in Colombo yesterday. He’ll work with me, documenting the purchase and distribution of the toys.

Lyn is a wraithlike blond from Oklahoma with boundless energy and an upbeat breadbasket twang. Based in Sri Lanka, she was vacationing in Phuket when the tsunami hit; a passionate runner, she was forced to run for her life — sprinting uphill through knee-deep water. Now she’s back in Colombo, dividing her time between her work in wildlife conservation and volunteer work for Mercy Corps.

She’s thrilled by Nancy’s interest and schedules our shopping expedition for mid-afternoon. We’ll scour the local toy and stationery shops, trying to put together comfort kits that make sense.

Lyn, a Mercy Corps administrator named Surangani, and I slouch into dense Colombo traffic at about 3 o’clock. For reasons that now elude me, we think that it’s going to be easy. I suspect it’s because we are blissfully ignorant; we imagine we can walk into any store and buy hundreds of cricket bats, dozens of stuffed dolphins, and scores of coloring books. The reality is more like a Keystone Kops scavenger hunt. We spend hours darting around town, buying a sack full of rubber balls here, a shopping cart full of volleyballs there, a bag of balloons somewhere else.

By the end of the day, sweating and covered with grime, we’ve managed to obtain two volleyballs nets, eight cricket bats, 10 soccer balls, 60 stuffed animals, five dozen tops, 96 hair clips, and six Frisbees. There are huge omissions in our purchases; it’s unlikely that any kid of the male persuasion, between the ages of 10 and 12, will be comforted by one of our cuddly parrot dolls or Barbie pencil cases. But we got what we could find, and, hey, that’s why they call it a pilot program.

The familiar tones of “Hava Nagila” chime from my cellphone and summon me to the lobby of our hotel at 7 a.m. Two pickup trucks await, one with Lyn and her driver, the other for photographer Dwayne and me. At quarter past 7, full of avocado juice and coffee, we set off on a 10-hour drive, 200 miles due east, bound for Arugam Bay, with a full load of toys and games.

It’s lusciously cool as we drive into the hills. Toque monkeys scamper across the roadside and ibis sail through the air. Sri Lanka’s hills are among the world’s most famous tea-producing regions and we pass numerous plantations and British colonial estates. The variety of vegetation is extreme, from rice paddies to palm trees, eucalyptus groves to rubber trees. Nearing the town of Kaslanda, we reach the high point of the trip — about 3,500 feet above sea level — and stop at a roadside store to pick up another dozen rubber balls. The towering veil of Diyaluma Falls appears on our left; after sampling a local brand of ginger beer we begin dropping, twisting ever downhill toward the Tamil communities and police check posts of the east coast.

The sun’s still up as we enter the town of Pottuvil. Here, Mercy Corps has been helping the fishing community rebuild its boats and reweave its nets, setting up cash-for-work programs, and distributing sport kits, school supplies and other items. But they’ve got enough money, and some of the locals are more concerned about the future than the present. “If people really want to help,” one local man tells Susan Romanski, who runs Mercy Corps’ office, “tell them not to send us money. Better they should put that money away and use it to come back here, as tourists, next year.”

As we arrive, Susan, a slender, round-faced dynamo whose work as Mercy Corps’ Emergency Program Manager routinely lands her in the planet’s hot spots, is in a state of beatific mania. Yesterday, she was approached by a camera crew from “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Oprah, apparently, has a personal interest in Arugam Bay, as one of her producers lost a friend in the tsunami there.

The crew seemed harmless enough, Susan says, filming her as she struggled to coordinate relief for the 3,392 families in the immediate area. They shot a few scenes of the local devastation, chatted with Susan about her biggest challenges (“the scope of the disaster — and making sure all of the camps get equitable relief”), and disappeared. Today, Mercy Corps headquarters calls Susan to relay a giddy fact: Her segment is airing on “Oprah.” Mercy Corps, along with two other nonprofit agencies in Sri Lanka, will share a million-dollar grant from the talk-show philanthropist.

Susan is afraid to check her e-mail and rightly so; if she is indeed on “Oprah,” her marriage proposals alone must number in the thousands. Instead, she calls an evening meeting of our staff at the private house we’re bunkered in. It’s a thick, tropical night; despite the ceiling fans, mosquitoes feast on our calves.

“These people,” Susan tells us, indicating the local staff, “have been out all day, visiting the camps and trying to figure out what people actually have. It’s always changing. People are coming in from everywhere, dropping off food and nonfood items; sometimes they just come to the closest camp, plop something down, and leave. So it’s turning out that some people have things and some people don’t.”

Clearly, Lyn and I have not brought enough comfort kits to supply all of the have-nots; one camp alone has nearly 600 children. We decide to try two things. First we’ll visit the Savalai camp. Its roster shows 102 children, and so with our stuffed animals, coloring books and rubber balls, we should be able to meet their needs. Next, we’ll drive eight miles north to Komari, which is the most distant and neglected of the camps. We’ll offer the Komari kids the high-ticket sport kit of their choice — cricket or volleyball or soccer — and throw in a Frisbee for good measure. No other relief agency in this area, as far as we know, is addressing the fact that these kids are in dire need of distraction.

To a lot of people, the image of relief agencies in developing countries is Toyota Land Cruisers churning down a dirt road with the windows rolled up and four grim foreign aid workers staring out the windows. That preconception is instantly shattered by Mercy Corps’ official vehicles in Arugam Bay: two three-wheeled tuk-tuks that sport the Mercy Corps bumper sticker, emblazoned with three of Sri Lanka’s religious icons: Lord Buddha, Lord Rama and Mickey Mouse.

Lyn and I, and local volunteer Harshana, spend the morning driving from one welfare center to another, trying to find out where our toys and sport kits would be most welcome. At each camp we meet the grama niladari, or group leader, responsible for coordinating each center’s supplies. These are always men, supervising a governing committee of men and women. Sometimes the G.N.s are individuals who were prominent before the tsunami, sometimes not. In one camp, the G.N. is an older man who displayed great heroism and selflessness during and after the flood.

As we pull up to the Savalai camp, children congregate around us, clutching floppy rabbits and German shepherds. The Red Cross passed through just yesterday, emptying a truckload of used stuffed animals. The G.N. of Savalai is a 48-year-old fisherman named Miran Lebe. When I first visited this camp last week, Lebe was wild-eyed and raging; I thought he was the village idiot. He was still in shock, Harshana explains.

“We have enough for our children,” declares Lebe. “Give what you have to the other camps.” Before we go, though, he corners Harshana. “We could use some kerosene lanterns,” he whispers, “to keep the wild elephants away.”

We’ll keep our toys, but we do want to offer a sports kit to the older kids. But which kit should we deliver — soccer balls, volleyballs and nets, or cricket sets? We quickly work out a system. The decision will be made by a committee of kids. A call goes out through the camp and about two dozen children, boys and girls, ages 8-12, are gathered together. Prompted by Harshana, they vote with a show of hands. We expect soccer (or football, as it’s known here) balls to be the runaway winner and it is. But there’s also a huge demand for Frisbees. Who knew?

Our second stop is a camp located behind the local mosque, not far from the beach. Our gifts are welcome and we hand out stuffed toys and rubber balls in a gleeful but orderly ceremony. Most of the recipients are very young and there are many babes-in-arms. The baby girls wear beautiful, dangly gold earrings, giving them a look of precocious sophistication. The wisdom of wearing jewelry suddenly seems very clear. Sometimes, the only wealth you can hang on to is what’s pierced through your earlobes and fastened around your neck.

As we prepare to leave, the G.N. approaches Lyn and asks for the one item most desperately needed by the camp: cooking kits. As things stand, there are so few pots that 10 families must cook their rice in shifts. It’s becoming a serious problem with obvious repercussions. “If we don’t eat,” the G.N. says dryly, “we don’t play.”

When the tsunami receded, one of the few structures left standing was a popular hotel called the Siam View. During that first terrible week after the tsunami, before the first relief shipments arrived, the owner of the hotel — Fred Miller, who has lived in Sri Lanka nearly 30 years — fed the entire community with provisions from the establishment’s copious freezers (its generator needed only small repairs to function). Miller is keeping up the practice, providing excellent Sri Lankan curries and ice cold soft drinks to the scores of local and foreign relief workers. It’s an oasis of heaven in a vast expanse of hell and the cost to all comers is zero (though donations are more than welcome). It’s a terrific example of how the community has banded together and a good place to see signs of optimism.

After lunch, we leave Arugam Bay and drive north, heading through spectacular wetlands teeming with egrets, eagles, kingfishers and ibis. Oxcarts heave to the side to let us by. Our destination is the large camp called Komari, settled by refugees who came from a devastated village still further north.

We’d heard awful things about Komari, that it was ignored, impoverished, and off the radar of the relief agencies. As we approach, we begin to suspect otherwise. The tents are spacious and set well apart, there are decent roads into the compound, and the view of the river is spectacular. As we drive in, we see about 100 kids sitting quietly under an open-air tent, watching “The Lion King” on a television.

The camp seems to have it all: fruit punch, hard candies, everything but buttered popcorn. Discussion with the G.N., though, confirms initial reports. The generator-operated DVD player is a special treat, provided by an expat Sri Lankan from Australia. Otherwise, the kids have virtually nothing to keep them busy: no toys, no games, no Frisbees.

We have no toys for the nearly 600 children in Komari but we will give them a sport kit. The word goes out for a children’s meeting and the response is electric. The kids leap up from “The Lion King” and form two groups — boys and girls — around us. Harshana takes center stage and conducts the poll.

“How many for cricket?” he demands.

The boys’ hands fly up.

“How many for volleyball?” The girls’ hands wave.

“And how many for football?” This time, every hand in the group shoots into the air.

Ten minutes later, we witness what must be the most satisfying sight one can see in the world of disaster relief. Scores of formerly listless kids are running and shouting in an open field, their football and cricket games in full swing. Some distance away, the Sri Lankan Army’s Special Task Force is helping set up the volleyball net.

We leave before the inevitable Frisbee ends up on someone’s roof.

The Republicans in the House are likely to pass a continuing resolution keeping government running for the time being that includes $3.7 billion in offset funding for disaster aid. The Senate’s measure contained $6.9 billion. The latest news is that Rep. Louise Slaughter failed to get the Democratic proposal into the resolution, making it likely that either the House will fail the pass the resolution (many Republicans don’t support it because it doesn’t cut enough spending), increasing the risk of shutdown, or the Senate will stay in session next week and pass it with more disaster aid, forcing it back to the House, where it could fail again.

This is a great way to fund a government, right?

I imagine that the GOP is betting that obstructionism and a potential shutdown will be blamed on “Congress,” generically, and they have learned that they can absorb that hatred and turn it into voter cynicism that leads to increased support for conservatives who hate the government. Reid and the Democrats, meanwhile, will probably cave at the last second to avoid a shutdown. And everyone will say, “oh dear, what is wrong with Washington,” and the answer to that question will remain “Eric Cantor.”

UPDATE: Well, the other problem is “John Boehner,” who is just very bad at his job. The continuing resolution failed 195-230, with Democrats holding out due to the FEMA funding mess and dozens of Republicans voting no because Boehner has no control over them.

Of course Rick Perry doesn’t want to see Texas burn, so it is rational of him to ignore his rhetorical distaste for the federal government and demand that it help. And Texas could use the help, because Perry and the Republicans who control all three branches of Texas government have severely slashed the budget of the Texas Forest Service.

Perry’s fanatical opposition to raising revenue to close Texas’ budget gap meant that his allies in the Legislature had to find creative ways to cut costs, like cutting $34 million over the next two years from the agency that fights wildfires. The Forest Service is mostly volunteer-based, and the cuts will largely affect the state’s assistance grants to buy volunteer departments the tools they need to fight fires.

The Forest Service was appropriated $117.7 million for the 2010-2011 fiscal year. That is not enough to cover the expense of fighting the fires currently burning across the state. For the 2012-2013 fiscal year, which began this month, the agency was appropriated $83 million.

The state has already approved supplemental spending to pay for firefighting that has already taken place, which is also $61 million short of what is needed. So, in other words, the budget intentionally appropriates less money than everyone knows the Forest Service will actually need in order to maintain the illusion of fiscal responsibility. And the Republicans will demand more federal money to make up the gap. While decrying federal spending.

Ken Layne draws a connection between gutting the Forest Service budget and the growing trend of municipal budget slashing done primarily to prove seriousness about the moral necessity of “austerity” in these Tough Times. But Perry’s not allowing everything to go to hell, like the people of Costa Mesa, Calif., so much as he’s requiring fiscal irresponsibility to pay for very basic services, like putting out fires. No new taxes and balanced budgets until it turns out we need money really bad!

The shortfalls in FEMA’s disaster aid account have been obvious to lawmakers on Capitol Hill for months — and privately acknowledged to them by FEMA — but the White House has opted against asking for more money, riling many lawmakers.

“Despite the fact that the need … is well known,” Reps. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., and David Price, D-N.C., wrote the administration last month, “it unfortunately appears that no action is being taken by the administration.” The lawmakers chair the panel responsible for FEMA’s budget.

FEMA now admits the disaster aid shortfall could approach $5 billion for the upcoming budget year, and that’s before accounting for Irene.

As a result, funds to help states and local governments rebuild from this year’s tornadoes, as well as past disasters like hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the massive Tennessee floods of last spring, have been frozen. Instead, FEMA is only paying for the “immediate needs” of disaster-stricken communities, which include debris removal, food, water and emergency shelter.

“Going into September being the peak part of hurricane season, and with Irene, we didn’t want to get to the point where we would not have the funds to continue to support the previous impacted survivors as well as respond to the next disaster,” FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told reporters at the White House on Monday.

Republicans controlling the House and the Democratic-controlled Senate may be headed toward a battle over whether to cut spending elsewhere in the budget to pay for tornado and hurricane aid.

A top leader in the tea party-driven House says that chamber will find those offsetting spending cuts. The Senate, however, is likely to take advantage of a little-noticed provision in the recently passed debt limit and budget deal that permits Congress to pass several billion dollars in additional FEMA disaster aid without budget cuts elsewhere.

“We will find the money if there is a need for additional money,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., told Fox News on Monday. “But those monies are not unlimited, and we have said we have to offset that.”

But Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who presided over a recent hearing on disaster costs, says the number and cost of disasters have grown dramatically over the past few years.

“If (Cantor) believes that we can nip and tuck at the rest of the federal budget and somehow take care of disasters, he’s totally out of touch with reality,” the No. 2 Senate Democrat said Tuesday.

Earlier this year, the administration requested $1.8 billion for FEMA’s disaster relief fund, despite pent-up demands for much more. Appropriations for last year totaled four times that amount.

FEMA estimates that the request still left the disaster fund short by $2 billion to $4.8 billion for the upcoming fiscal year. Those are figures the agency provided to Congress this spring — before Irene or the tornadoes that destroyed huge swaths of Joplin, Mo., or beat up the South.

With recovery operations from Irene still in the early stages, FEMA spokesman Rachel Racusen said it is too early to know whether that projected shortfall has increased or by how much.

“It’s just too soon to know what any uninsured losses will be,” Racusen said.

“Even though the president himself said that we are going to do everything we can to help these communities rebuild, the rhetoric has not matched reality, and the Disaster Relief Fund is running out of money,” Aderholt said.

The likely vehicle for replenishing the disaster account is the homeland security spending bill for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. The House passed the measure in early June, but the Senate has yet to act.

A House-Senate collision over disaster aid would risk further delays in replenishing dangerously low FEMA disaster accounts.

“It’s too early to tell what the damage assessment will be and what next steps may need to be taken,” said Meg Reilly, a spokeswoman for the White House budget office.

It’s hardly the first time that longer-term rebuilding projects like schools and sewer systems have been frozen out to make sure there’s money to provide disaster victims with immediate help with food, water and shelter. But it’s frustrating to communities like Nashville, Tenn., which is rebuilding from last year’s historic floods.

The Obama White House is just the latest administration to lowball disaster relief requests. Over the past two decades, Congress has approved $130 billion for FEMA’s disaster account. But the bulk of that money, $110 billion, has been provided as emergency funding in addition to the annual budget.

Associated Press writer Alicia Caldwell contributed to this story.