As we’re standing with the Mercy Corps and Sewalanka team, discussing the sort of support they might offer the fishermen and net makers, one of the men steps forward. He’s wearing a clean white shirt and resembles Walter Matthau. He has no special request; he simply wants us to know that he has lost everything.

“My son, my daughter, my wife and ” But the fisherman cannot finish his sentence; he breaks down in sobs. All around me, fishermen fight back tears; I succumb. It is another one of those moments when the sheer force of loss hits me like a physical blow. I put myself in this fisherman’s place and wonder if I, after losing everything that gave my life joy and structure, could begin to rebuild after three short weeks.

During lunch at the Siam View, I ask Dominique Kerr, a member of the French Red Cross team, about patients in the infirmary. “We’re not seeing a lot of injuries anymore,” he replies. “Most of what we’re dealing with now is post-traumatic stress disorder.” What’s interesting, Kerr remarks, is that the men, women and children all manifest the syndrome with different symptoms.

“For children, the main thing is fear of the sea,” Kerr says. “They won’t go near the water. For women, they can’t sleep. When they come in, they tell us everything is fine — but soon the truth comes out. They are just not sleeping. For men, it is different. They come in, claiming to be sick and looking sick. But they are not sick; there is nothing physically wrong with them. Then we know it is the post-traumatic stress.”

Our next destination is the town of Baticalloa, 75 miles to the north. Just above Pottuvil, we pass through the ruins of Komari village. Aside from the cleared road, there are no signs that anything has changed since the tsunami. Walking through the empty place, past broken bicycles and torn Bibles, is like being in a hamlet after the plague. Waves break in the background, the occasional coconut falls to earth and bursts on the ground. Otherwise, all is silence, an otherworldly quiet that seems to call for an echoing silence.

After exploring Komari, I ask our driver to backtrack half a mile, to the Finnish Red Cross field hospital. The clinic serves the Komari camp, where we recently distributed footballs and Frisbees to the heirs of the ruined village. At the mobile hospital, I find Dr. Johannes, a white-haired surgeon who spent much of his career working in Cambodia with victims of the Khmer Rouge.

“Everyone here has post-traumatic stress,” Johannes emphasizes. “Yesterday, for example, a woman came in with all the signs of a gastric ulcer: the kind often created by stress. People are coming in all the time, claiming body pains, but when you look, there’s no cause for it. A man came in with severe pain in his knee and we checked him carefully: nothing, nothing, nothing. Nonetheless,” he says, “they seem to improve when you examine them, and listen to them.”

The only effective way to treat people for this condition, he claims, is to talk to them. Just having the medical camp present is a comfort, but the main problem is language. “You can bring in as many psychosocial counselors as you like,” says Johannes, “but if you don’t speak their language, you can forget it. This, I learned in Cambodia.”

Kids, on the other hand, are more nonverbal. “They respond very well when they are given a doll or a stuffed animal,” Johannes observes. “Something they can care about, and protect. It makes them feel stronger, themselves.”

Our drive up the coast toward Batticaloa is interrupted by numerous detours and backtracks. We’ll pass through a town and travel five rough miles up the half-collapsed road, only to find the bridge down. Illustrated with fierce clarity is the sheer breadth of the killer wave. The entire coastline of Sri Lanka is a wreck. Sometimes the damage lies right at the shore, sometimes it extends far inland, but it is nearly universal. Many houses of worship — Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim — were spared but not all. Just north of Thirrukovil we find a Hindu temple hit by the tsunami. Colorful statues and bits of paintings lay scattered across the roadside like an exploded bouquet.

It makes me wonder, again, if I would have understood — when the water rushed out, exposing the seabed — what was in store. The truth is, I don’t know. None of us had any sense of what precedes a tsunami, as there haven’t been any this severe during our lifetimes. Disaster movies don’t show the water receding; a huge wave simply rushes in, tossing taxi cabs and billboards down the street. Would I have run out to marvel at the exposed reef or run in the other direction? There is no way to reckon whether I’d have been saved by my intuition or killed by my curiosity.

Batticaloa, about a third of the way up Sri Lanka’s east coast, is the Club Med of the relief world. We spend our single evening in town at Sabharaj, the only open restaurant in Batticaloa packed with expats. The culture shock nearly does me in. I’d forgotten what a circus the aid world can be, when scores of organizations are jockeying for position within a convoluted, often chaotic environment.

Amid the crowded tables and clouds of cigarette smoke, I meet a petite, athletic-looking woman named Isabel. She’s just arrived, charged with directing the French team of Médicins Sans Frontihres. Isabel has been in the country only one day but she already seems like a victim of relief burnout.

“We closed our office in Trincomalee yesterday,” she says. “There was nothing for us to do. Even here in Batticaloa, I don’t yet know where we can be of use.” Several days ago, she reminds me, MSF controversially asked (on its Web site) that people no longer donate money for tsunami relief; there are other global crises with an equal or greater need. Isabel agrees with the statement. She’s fed up with the present situation, with dozens of overfunded relief agencies tripping over each other. They’re duplicating efforts like medical care, she says, while falling short on long-term needs like rebuilding the economic bedrock of the community.

I sympathize with her frustration. Three weeks after the tsunami, much of the relief community seems in a state of disarray, with less coordination and cooperation than one might expect. Nothing is going to waste — whatever comes in is being distributed — but there’s an inequality of distribution, which can lead to anger or violence. And human resources are being wasted. Doctors are being turned away; groups like MSF are pounding the pavement, looking for places to hang their berets.

Normally, the 100-mile drive from Batticaloa to Trincomalee takes a few scenic hours, but the seaside route is impassable and we are forced to traverse two long inland legs, rather than the coastal hypotenuse of an enormous triangle.

The way is lined with Sri Lanka Army checkpoints, barricades and spools of razor wire. A placid lagoon is surrounded by an electrified fence. They’re stark reminders that, during the decades before the tsunami, Sri Lanka was already wracked by waves of violence. Even the disaster has not brokered a truce between the Tamil separatist movement and the Sinhalese government. The LTTE, or Tamil Tigers, accuse the government of shortchanging them on relief supplies and using the disaster as an opportunity to infiltrate their operations. The government, for its part, accuses the Tigers of hindering its shipments and using the tsunami as an attempt to build political capital.

The temptation to use the tsunami for political ends is clearly irresistible. We’ve already seen this with the JVP, Sri Lanka’s once-ruthless Marxist party. In the 1980s, the government launched an all-out war on the JVP, killing thousands of their soldiers and obliterating their leadership. The JVP has since reformed, and is now a legitimate, if marginalized, political player. But now the party is emerging in force, sending huge cleanup crews into devastated areas. Disasters, I’m learning, are great equalizers. The government dares not stop any effort aimed at assisting the tens of thousands of displaced persons here in Sri Lanka. It’s not surprising that the groups who despise the ruling party are seizing this chance to deliver what the government itself has been so terribly slow to provide: hands-on assistance in the villages hardest hit.

Before the tsunami, Trincomalee was a lovely harbor town, occupied throughout its storied history by a dizzying concatenation of stewards. The Danish, Dutch, French and British have all made landfall here, leaving scattered relics of their reigns.

Today rain falls in sheets, flooding the muddy roads. Tuk-tuks slog through the downpour, water up to their running boards. Every vehicle throws up huge fins of water, drenching the bicyclists and pedestrians unlucky enough to be caught on the roadside. The waves of the Bay of Bengal crash against the ribbon of shoreline, clawing at the wreckage of hotels and beach huts that, last Christmas, lined the loveliest beaches in Sri Lanka. It’s the same destruction we’ve seen everywhere but in a sweeter key.

Nilaweli Hospital is a low white structure located a few miles north of Trinco town, a few hundred yards beyond two of the area’s main refugee camps. Dr. Sahadevam, the medical officer in charge, greets me in his office. Sahadevam is a black-haired, compact man, who has set up shop in a region where the suffering varies only by degree. He, like so many others in this region, is frustrated with the lack of progress dealing with post-traumatic stress.

“I can’t even tell you,” he says. “There are so many cases. Yesterday, a woman was brought in; she couldn’t breathe. Clinically, she was normal. But when she returned to her home after the waves, looking for her parents, she found only her mother’s hair.”

There’s an immediate and desperate need, the doctor says, for psychosocial counselors. “But because Sri Lanka is an undeveloped country, we haven’t built a good supply. Still,” he states, echoing his Finnish colleague to the south, “it is imperative that they speak the languages here. So what we need right now is for foreign counselors to come in, and rather than treat people themselves, train qualified, local caregivers in post-traumatic stress counseling. These workers should be deployed in each and every camp,” he adds. “They are needed everywhere.”

It’s urgent, Sahadevam insists, because, as the shock and denial wear off, some people are blaming themselves for the deaths of their loved ones. Tragically, their sense of shame and guilt is being reinforced by equally shattered peers.

“It’s not uncommon for one refugee to tell another, ‘Oh, if only you had taken your kids to church that day or to their auntie’s house, they would have lived.’”

One of Sri Lanka’s greatest strengths, and perils, is its ethnic diversity. I ask Sahadevam if the different religious groups should be counseled on their own terms by the tenets of their spiritual paths.

“There is no need to counsel in a different way,” he states imperatively. “Everyone looks at the tsunami attack in their own way. But we cannot look at everyone differently. Basically, they are all depressive patients. They must be treated consistently.”

“Are their religious leaders available for counseling and guidance?”

“Those people are not making the rounds,” Sahadevam says. “And the refugees, who are packed together, have no way to get to them. Also, most of the leaders are very involved in the relief effort itself.”

In the mosque camps, the religious leaders are busy compiling demographics and coordinating with the aid agencies. The church is feverishly active as well. At the St. John’s Tsunami Relief and Rehabilitation Center in Batticaloa, an Episcopal reverend known as “Father J” (short for Jeyanesan) is spearheading a multilevel effort that includes orphanages, feeding centers, vocational training and emergency relief supplies. (The popular reverend was already immersed in refugee work, providing for families displaced by the civil war when the tsunami struck. Trained at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Father J’s commitment to spiritual integration is immediately obvious; St. John’s is the first church I’ve seen with a Jewish mezuza in its doorway.)

As Dr. Sahadevam speaks, I take frantic notes, wondering if the program he suggests — training counselors, teachers and other community leaders in PTSD skills — is an area where Mercy Corps might help. One of my roles, during the past several days, has been as Mercy Corps’ ambassador-at-large, looking for gaps the organization can successfully fill. “Giving medicine is a one-day game,” he observes. “But dealing with post-traumatic stress is a long-term process.”

While we’re on the subject of medicine, Dr. Sahadevam has one more problem he’d like to discuss. Beginning a few days after the tsunami, he explains, vans full of foreign medical teams have been rushing into the camps, unloading medicine on the refugees.

“What we’re facing now,” he says, “are overdose problems.” Some cases arise, it appears, from attempts to treat PTSD with whatever drugs are on hand. “One girl came in yesterday, doubled over with stomach pain; she had taken 18 Panadols (an aspirin-like analgesic). Another woman took seven antihistamines and fainted. One of the first things these medical groups did was freely dispense powerful antibiotics. Granted, antibiotics were needed; some people had injured themselves amid the debris and there was risk of infection. Now, however, we are seeing reactions to their indiscriminate use: pain, swelling and allergic rashes. And the worst part is, the fevers they gave the drugs for are not subsiding! They’re a viral thing!”

The situation is similar to what’s happening with the political parties; in an atmosphere like this, nobody dares stand in the way of assistance, no matter how self-serving it may be. All foreign aid groups, whatever their origin, have agendas to fill. First, they have to be here, as it would look terrible if they weren’t. Next, they are legally obliged to spend the money donated for tsunami relief in the affected areas. If their mission is medicine, they must find a way to provide medicine — even if the camps are knee-deep in Cipro. The result is a free-for-all, at least as far as drugs are concerned. Ironically, many of the refugees, overwhelmed with drugs, still lack basics like mats, mosquito netting and hurricane lamps.

A structure for coordination exists here in Trinco. Responsible agencies are drawing up needs and sharing their findings with their colleagues. But there are scores of aid groups, and not all of them are part of the matrix. From the refugees’ point of view, the distribution is piecemeal; they have no way of knowing when a distribution is wise or unwise.

The only solution, Sahadevam believes, is to require medical agencies to follow proper channels and coordinate with the Ministry of Health. Beginning next week, he believes, the MOH will visit the camps and tell the camp leaders which NGOs have the authority to give out medicines. The refugees will be cautioned against other suppliers and told what to do. “It’s quite simple,” Sahadevam explains. “When unauthorized people come and offer you these drugs, ‘Just say no.’”

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.

But that’s behind us, now. The Black Hawk lifted off at 1 o’clock this afternoon. We were supposed to bring 10 boxes of tarpaulins to Arugam Bay on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, but we ended up taking half as many after an NBC “Dateline” crew wrangled its way onboard. Now we sit together in the cramped cargo bay, squeezed between the boxes of supplies.

Sri Lanka is still a beautiful country and the area between the coastlines was untouched by the disaster. We fly over gorgeous green hills, lakes and rivers, as the shadows of clouds move across white Buddhist temples and palm groves. Then the mountains flatten and the hills undulate toward the coastal area — which appears, from above, like a stagnant and littered swamp.

Prior to the tsunami, Arugam Bay was considered one of the 10 best surf spots in the world; the British held their surfing championships here in 2003. Aside from a thriving tourism industry, the community included thousands of fishermen and their families. But the three waves of December’s tsunami struck this region with apocalyptic force, killing an estimated 3,000 people, flattening the fishing villages, and turning the strand of beachside hotels and restaurants into a scene of Hiroshima-like ruin.

Five boxes of plastic sheeting seems a pathetic offering, but a team from Mercy Corps and the Sewalanka Foundation, one of the country’s most important community development organizations, is waiting in the rain with flatbeds. Quick as a wink, the Black Hawk touches down and the supplies are unloaded. The “Dateline” crew gets a few manic shots — barely leaving the chopper — and the helicopter is off again. We watch it bank east, wondering when, or if, we will see it again.

Jim Jarvie, a high-spirited and compassionate Brit with a shaved head and King Tut goatee, is Mercy Corp’s man in this area. His fields are forestry and conservation; he was living in Colombo, writing “The Natural Guide to Sri Lanka,” when the tsunami struck. Somehow, he’s ended up choreographing the complex dance between Mercy Corps and the regional NGOs, a task he handles with impressive élan.

We ride on the back of the tractor to a cement warehouse, where Jarvie introduces me to Harshanan, the energetic young team leader for Sewalanka. The boxes are unloaded and stacked with other supplies — mainly “family hygiene kits,” which, ironically, were delivered yesterday morning, entirely by accident. (The agency that delivered them had the audacity to call Jim and ask that they be reloaded on a helicopter and sent back; Jarvie recalls the moment with hilarity.)

The kits are fairly basic, containing shampoo, soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, shaving razors and sanitary napkins. We carry 270 kits in all. For half an hour, the tractor churns along a mud-holed track, passing shallow lakes created by the tsunami. Pied kingfishers perch on tree branches; goats poke through trash; a mongoose skitters into a brush. A lone computer monitor sits on a patch of grass, as if someone has set up an office in the wilderness.

After the supplies are stored, Jarvie takes me on a tour of the beach. The devastation is complete. Everyone we see has lost loved ones and friends, and even now, two weeks later, they stand in the rubble of their homes and businesses as if trying to decide which way to turn.

“Some 1,500 families lived here,” Jarvie says. “Everyone was affected. There are about 3,000 dead. Surprisingly few injuries, though. One of my friends here put it this way: ‘If you were caught, you drowned.’

“The problem now is psychological,” he continues. “Just today, people are starting to talk; and they’re starting to cry. Their stoicism is collapsing. A lot of them lost everything. One woman tried to hang herself yesterday; two men have gone mad. We’re at the point now where the shock is wearing off. These people are just realizing what hit them.”

As we walk, numerous people approach Jarvie. They speak quietly, sometimes showing pictures of lost friends or family, sometimes asking for money. Jarvie treats each of them with extraordinary respect, explaining that while Mercy Corps cannot help individuals, everything is being done to help supply essentials and rebuild the community. “Bear with us,” he says. “Arugam will come back.” He never fails to ask how the victim’s family has fared, listening intently before expressing his sympathy.

“There’s nothing I can do for these people on a one-to-one basis,” Jarvie explains, “except listen to them. And many of them, I’ve learned, need very much to be heard.”

I find myself unprepared for the emotional impact of walking through the leveled fishing village and obliterated tourist strips. The roads have disintegrated into ragged ribbons and the bridges are shattered as if by a giant hammer. Toyota vans and pickup trucks lie smashed against trees or half-buried in sand. Bodies wash ashore nearly every day; scores are feared to lie beneath the mucky silt. Entire houses, with cement foundations and masonry walls, are literally torn in half. The body of a German resident — a friend of Jarvie’s — was torn from his hotel office and carried 3 kilometers inland; his wife, who had been on the structure’s second floor, survived.

Some people are wandering around with vacant stares, while others have already begun the process of rebuilding. “The first contribution Mercy Corps received,” says Jarvie, “was 10 shovels and a wheelbarrow  from the Arugam Bay Surf Club.” We walk by its headquarters. In contrast to the rubble-strewn yards around it, the clubhouse grounds seem eerily well-groomed.

At the refugee camp of Atimule, 107 families wait for supplies. Distribution is polite and orderly, the families taking numbers and receiving their kits before moving away with a word of thanks. I’m taken aback by the graciousness of the process. One man approaches Harshanan with a shy request; he’d like to know if he might have the cardboard box the kits arrived in. This causes brief confusion; there’s no real policy for this.

Watching the distribution, I ask Jarvie a convoluted question: What can Sewalanka actually do better, now that Mercy Corps is here?

“On their own, they’d have goods from individual donors,” Jim replies, “but not these immediate relief supplies, like the hygiene kits and tarpaulins from USAID. But you might also ask, ‘What can Mercy Corps do better, working with Sewalanka?’ The answer is, almost everything. They’re our eyes, ears, and often our legs on the ground.”

Jim and I walk through the ruins of Ullai, the fishing village annihilated by the waves. We sink to our ankles in soft mud. Sewing machines and broken wall clocks emerge from the silt like fossils from a tar pit. I remove my boots and gingerly ford a stream, terrified of stepping on a human limb. Luckily, such encounters have become rare.

For our final errand of the day, I join Jarvie at a meeting with a local businessman named André Tissera. His hotel, the Hideaway, is nearly intact, one of the least damaged structures in Arugam Bay. Even the bookcases are untouched, the volumes stacked with surreal formality behind leaded glass doors.

Tissera is in his late 40s, a wiry character with graying hair and fast-paced, ironic English. He describes his surname as an acronym — “T for Thailand, I for Italy, S for Spain, S for Sweden, E for England, R for Russia, and A for America.” He reminds me of a young, somewhat darker Lenny Bruce. He confers with Jarvie about the most essential priority — cleaning up the village — and shares his exasperation with some of the relief efforts.

“We received an entire shipment of miniskirts,” he moans, “and ties. Ties! And not a small number! Someone should tell these people to stick their old clothes in an attic, instead of unloading them on us.” But the lion’s share of his wrath is bestowed upon a humane society based in Colombo. Tissera says he could hardly contain himself when, opening up one of its relief packages, he found a shipment of dog food.

Mercy Corps will soon begin a “Cash for Work” program in this area, paying 100 local people for 21 days of full-time cleanup. Jim and André discuss the situation, trying to determine which 100 of the thousands of eligible workers they’ll hire. The hierarchy, both agree, should start with those who have lost their entire houses. The next layer, Tissera suggests, should favor people “who will come back.”

Not everyone will. Earlier, I’d spoken with a fisherman who had lost his son; his home was also destroyed. When I asked when he’d fish again, the man shook his head in a panic and clapped his chest in the universal gesture of fear.

“Never,” he said. “I will open hotel, or make other business. I won’t ever go into the sea again.”

Tissera, in contrast, is determined to demonstrate that people can reclaim their traditional lives and vocations. Just 36 hours after the tsunami, to the slack-jawed astonishment of his neighbors, he piloted one of the only surviving boats into the lagoon. He has since made a project of rounding up vessels scattered by the killer wave and repairing their damage. Tissera reckons that a third of them can be saved. (It’s estimated that 80 percent of Sri Lanka’s entire fishing fleet was destroyed.) His motive is simple: If the people of Arugam Bay cannot overcome their fear of the ocean, their community will never recover.

“I’m going fishing at 6 a.m. tomorrow,” he says defiantly.

When I ask if there’s anything left to catch — a question that not even the marine experts have yet answered — Tissera replies with absolute confidence.

“The fishing should be brilliant,” he says. “Nobody’s been out for 10 days.”

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For information about how you can help the victims of the tsunami, click here.

It’s a combination nightmare and dream come true. More than anything, it’s an exercise in being careful what you wish for. Days after the earthquake in Sumatra, the most recklessly generous part of my soul offered a dare to the rest of me: Would I continue to watch reports of the flooding and devastation on television, or get on a plane to Bangkok? I had no idea what I’d do once I arrived, but it seemed I could be of use somewhere. On the spur of the moment I called Third Eye Travel, which specializes in discount trips to Asia. Yes, I could be on a plane to Thailand on the 31st of December.

Then the doubts arrived. Visions of volunteer overkill in Thailand — and breathless anxiety — joined forces with the fact that I had long-anticipated plans for New Year’s Eve. I was caught between the scared and the mundane. And so, instead of booking my ticket, I got on the phone and made calls to the two relief organizations where I had personal contacts: UNICEF in New York, and Mercy Corps in Washington. I needed to find out if my presence in Indonesia, India or Sri Lanka would be more of an asset than a liability.

On Jan. 3, the telephone rang in my Oakland, Calif., flat. Matthew DeGalan, a Mercy Corps director at its head office in Portland, Ore., was on the line. A communications officer in Sri Lanka had been called home for an emergency. I was invited to take over her post, and asked to get on a plane for Colombo as soon as was humanly possible. My job would commence immediately on arrival, and would continue as long as I chose to stay, with a minimum commitment of two to three weeks.

Sri Lanka is a small country, off the southeastern tip of India. The population is 19.5 million. Thirty thousand of these people were killed by the tsunami. Though Indonesia suffered three times as many casualities, its population is seven times greater than Sri Lanka’s — so the small island nation, proportionally, was the land most severely punished. And the damage was widespread; today’s Herald Tribune reports that 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s 830-mile coastline was ravaged by the waves.

My mandate, Matthew said, would be broad. I’d be expected to write stories, shoot digital video and photographs, and serve as a liaison with the international press. In addition, I’d be filing my own dispatches — for Ethical Traveler, ThingsAsian and Salon.com. Accompanying me would be my lifelong friend Dwayne Newton, a San Francisco firefighter, EMT and professional photojournalist, who would join me after I got there.

My flight was scheduled to board just before midnight the next day. The next 34 hours were spent in a fury of preparation. There were travel vaccines to renew and a dozen bills to pay in advance. I was told to pick up a video camera, an internationally compatible cellphone and all the gear necessary to serve as the eyes and ears of Mercy Corps during its relief efforts in Sri Lanka.

Our arrival in Singapore is imminent. There are nothing but unknowns ahead. I pray that I can find eloquence in the midst of so much chaos and suffering, and bring you a few stories you might not hear elsewhere. Almost all my work will be connected with Mercy Corps activities. Mercy Corps, new to Sri Lanka, is joining with local NGOs and grass-roots agencies to support relief efforts in a variety of hard-hit locations.

And sitting here on this 747, with the clouds above Singapore growing beneath me, I’m granted a bit of self-understanding. The point of travel and writing, for me, has always been to visit places where I can be fascinated — and useful — at the same time.

Let’s hope the former never outweighs the latter.

Jan. 8, 2005. My driver is an elderly man named Chandra, provided by my hosts at Mercy Corps. We leave Colombo at 11 a.m. The traffic is terrible, and we crawl through a purgatory of packed buses and belching two-stroke tempos. MacDonald’s, Pizza Hut and endless billboards for cellphone service line Galle Road, with the ocean appearing and disappearing on our right. There isn’t a hint of damage; nothing to indicate that this country is in the midst of one of humanity’s worst natural disasters.

I have been here before, a long time ago. In January of 1984, two months shy of my 30th birthday, I explored the west coast of Sri Lanka on one of my first travel assignments. My girlfriend Teri and I started in Colombo, and traveled by bus to the southern tip of the island at Dondra Head: the last landfall until the frozen beaches of Antarctica. Then, as now, Sri Lanka was recovering from the flare-up of the civil war, and tourism was beginning to blossom after a tense hiatus. Some of my memories from that visit are still vivid: from walks along the long, lazy beaches of Panadura to visions of the “stilt” fishermen of Koggala, balanced above the surf on precarious wooden posts.

South of Moratuwa, beyond the famous Mount Lavinia Hotel, the impact of the tsunami becomes evident. It’s worst along the beach, where the poorest citizens inhabited makeshift wooden houses. Chandra parks the car. I walk over mounds of household flotsam toward the ocean. There are piles of debris everywhere: surreal assemblages of televisions and teddy bears, checkerboards and linoleum flooring, tattered pants and half-filled ledger books. The displaced inhabitants moved amid the chaos, sifting listlessly through what had been backyards and kitchens.

We drive on — until, a mile further south, we seem to cross a line. The traffic thins, and the whole western shoreline is suddenly an expanse of rubble, shattered houses and bulldozed woodpiles. Chandra holds a hand up to his wizened face, and keeps a running line of dialogue: “Oh, look … Sir … See!  Tsunami! Sir, look ”

It’s not as if he thinks I’m missing anything; he simply needs to express his astonishment, to connect with another soul in the face of so much destruction.

This is where, after two weeks of television footage and magazine photos, it hits home for me. This isn’t news; it’s not a TV drama, or a story with a start, middle and ending. It’s tens of thousands of unhappy people in the midst of their ruined lives, homeless, waiting for their longest bad dream to end.

Every time we walk amid the destruction, locals wave us over. They want us to see what remains of their lives. This is where their children went to school; this was a restaurant, or post office, or hotel. “Come this way! Come, come!” We hurry ahead, stepping over ragged blocks of cement, broken glass, broken pails. Chandra is barefoot; I’m wearing hiking boots.

On the beach at Panadura, a group of young volunteers from the JVP — Sri Lanka’s communist party — work to untangle what I assume is a fishing net from a rubble of electrical posts. Actually, it’s a volleyball net; this was once a popular playground. They let me take photos, and point to the cleanup they’ve accomplished today.

“Thanks for showing me what you’re doing,” I nod, moving on.

“We are not showing,” their leader states pointedly. “We are doing.”

Driving through Payagala, we navigate long stretches where everything seems normal, untouched, before entering zones of utter destruction. “Sir, see ” Chandra points to the train station; it looks like it’s been hit by an asteroid. Now the traffic is bad again — accident up ahead, or a bulldozer — and we’re stuck. Right ahead of us is an ambulance, packed with medications, also trapped. I glance in the back window at a box, reading the bold letters through the glass: “Keep Refrigerated.”

Beruwala, halfway to the southern port of Galle, was a thriving fishing village. You can still see the boats; they’re well-made, brightly painted, and strewn all over the roadside. Some are snapped in half, while other have simply been flipped over, like beetles. They lay in the surf, belly up. Piled up this way, the simile is unavoidable; they look like toys, churned to destruction in a soap-filled tub.

The road looks nothing like I remember it; nor does it look anything like it did right after the tsunami. One week ago rubble covered everything, and two major bridges were washed away. The road reopened just five days ago, Chandra tells me, after a fleet of bulldozers shoved tons of debris, boats and broken buildings to the side.

We stop for lunch at the Avanhala Restaurant in Bentota. Manager R.G. Jayawardena, a short man with an enormous belly, hands me his business card; it proclaims his diploma in journalism. When I press him on this, he opens a file and extracts the snapshots he took of the Queen of the Sea, the packed tourist train that was derailed by the tsunami, with an awful loss of life. They’re not good photographs, but they were taken fresh. If anything, they show that the voyeuristic impulse is universal. Jayawardena’s images, showing him standing beside the train’s wrecked engine, remind me of the photos people took in San Francisco’s Marina District after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Such photos are highly prized, for they show us with monuments that are both majestic and temporary, and as spectacular as they are notorious.

We pay our bill and drive onward to Balapitiya, which, Chandra informs me, was a mainly Muslim community. Looking at the egalitarian damage — to the homes of Hindus, Christians and Muslims alike — puts paid to the notion of a God who takes sides. On the other hand, it’s remarkable to note that, in many towns, the most significant shrines of each religion — a crucifix in Maggona, a meditating Buddha in Akurala, and a statue of Shiva in a Hindu shrine along the road — were miraculously spared. Seeing one example, I’d be tempted to dismiss it as coincidence. But witnessed in nearly every settlement, the site of these lone shrines, standing amid endless rubble, is enough to make even this cynic hedge his bets.

South of Balapitiya, we enter the northern fringe of Sri Lanka’s tourist Mecca: the town of Ambalangoda, famous for its carved and brightly painted wooden masks. The contrast between the two parts of the area — one devastated, the other intact — is maddening. “Why, Sir?” demands Chandra, as if I might know. “Why?”

A few miles south, though, in Akurala, we get part of the answer.

Dharma Sena, a wiry 50-year-old fisherman who survived the tsunami by scampering, barefoot, up a nearby balsa tree (a feat he performs for me in five breathless seconds), points to the ruined buildings around our feet. The foundation blocks, Sena points out, are made of broken coral. To build their city, the people in Akurala hacked the reef into blocks and covered it with a layer of cement. Coral reefs protect islands from the force of the waves. When the tsunami rolled in, Sena theorizes, the areas denuded of coral received the sea’s greatest fury. A short lesson in karma, brutally delivered; but one that has import for anyone intrigued by the laws of cause and effect. It is not a question of good, or evil; simply a matter of what happens when humans fail to act mindfully.

Beyond Akurala, we see white flags everywhere: on power poles, fluttering from phone lines, dancing above fresh graves in the local cemeteries. This, Chandra explains, is the Buddhist symbol of mourning. Where cloth is scarce, a piece of clear plastic will do; and where there is no clear plastic, part of a red plastic bag will suffice.

Entering Paraliya, we behold a scene of complete devastation; an area where the sea rushed aground with such might that an entire neighborhood, for half a mile inland, was annihilated. Through an unbelievable stroke of bad luck, Sri Lanka’s most popular tourist train — the Queen of the Sea — was passing through Paraliya at that precise moment. There were more than a thousand people aboard that train. Nearly all of them perished as the cars, tracks and ties were upended by the wave, scattered across the landscape like giant link sausages.

Chandra parks the car, and we’re permitted to approach the site where the train reclamation was in progress. Most of the cars have been lifted by cranes, placed back on the realigned track, and pushed together into a battered caravan. Inside, the coaches are torn to shreds. Amid the apocalypse are surreal items left untouched: A packet of unopened biscuits rests in a twisted luggage rack; a folded newspaper lies under a seat. More macabre are the shoes that haunt the corridor, and the contents of a German tourist’s wallet, scattered across the floor.

Nothing I’ve ever seen compares with the wholesale ruin of Paraliya. The streets have the aesthetic perfection of an expertly decorated disaster movie set. Here is a tree, decorated entirely with clothes; a scattered deck of cards, with the queen of spades face up; a blasted-out living room, with an idyllic mountain scene on the one untouched wall. Unopened suitcases lay in still pools of water, and wrought-iron window screens are webbed with foliage, netting and pages from grade-school readers.

On one of the dirt roads, we met a man walking along with a small boy — his son. When the tsunami approached, the man told us, he was with all seven of his children. He gathered them around, and they wrapped their arms around each other. All of them survived.

The story seemed incredible. How could a family of eight survive a killer wave that picked up a hundred-ton train and slammed it through the wall of a building? But if my drive down the coast of Sri Lanka has taught me anything, it’s that Dec. 26, 2004, was a study in capriciousness. One house might be reduced to rubble; the one beside it, completely untouched.

The encounter in Paraliya underscores another fact: Human beings are remarkably tenacious. I’d expected that all the people along this ravaged coastline would be the sole survivors of their family or circle of friends. I did meet some who had lost children, or neighbors; but most of them had managed to read the signs of the sea, and flee to safe havens before all hell broke loose.

By now, any comparison to the leisurely journey that Teri and I had made in 1984 had faded into oblivion. After 20 years, it’s unlikely that any of the homestays we had visited even exist anymore. This whole coast of Sri Lanka — most of South Asia, to tell the truth — has been transformed by development during the past 15 years.

Still, the village of Hikkaduwa was one of our favorite places when we visited in 1984. Late one night, hearing drums in the jungle, we wandered through the brush and found ourselves witnessing a demon-purging dance. The traditional exorcism continued until morning, and terrible things were done to a chicken. But it felt as if we’d been let in on a secret: For all its modern trappings, Sri Lanka was still a place where magic held its own.

In early 1984, central Hikkaduwa was a sleepy enclave, with bungalows on the beach and one or two dive shops. Today, the main stretch is a scrabble of gutted cafes, empty scuba shops and torn billboards advertising the wonders of the sea. Along the coast, a fishing boat — the “Lucky Four” — lies in pieces. I don’t count them.

After more than 20 years, my memories of our long-ago Sri Lanka trip are obscure. But this coast, as far south as one can go, was the area that had seemed the most remote, exotic and romantic. In Koggala, south of Galle and Unawatuna, Teri and I rented a romantic bungalow on a stretch of beach that looked like a Technicolor postcard. We swam, read and ate flaming-hot curries as stilt fishermen balanced on poles above the surf, trolling for the evening’s catch.

Sri Lanka’s southwestern villages were traditionally famous for their gemstones, one of Sri Lanka’s exotic exports. Walking into a tangle of collapsed shops, I meet a grinning man with short gray hair: Laljayanta, owner of the late Laljayanta Beach Bungalow. Beside him stands Chandra Sena, who two weeks ago managed Bravo Tours and Internet Cafe. We stand amid a litter of empty velvet display trays, recently filled with a rainbow of precious stones. I can’t help wondering if the owners of this establishment had managed to save any of the sapphires, rubies and emeralds in their windows, cases and safes. The men laugh, and shake their heads.

“We tried to save our lives,” says Laljayanta, who escaped the floodwaters by gunning his little moped into the nearby jungle. “The jewels, we can earn again later.”

In 1984, we took nearly a week to explore the coast. This time, I’m doing it in a single afternoon. The southernmost point of our journey will be Koggala, just short of Dondra Head. Despite my keen nostalgia, I have no expectation of seeing a stilt fisherman — so I’m astounded when Chandra, my driver, points to the sea with a shout. Out amid the breakers — poised among a stand of coastal rocks that look vaguely familiar — is a single fisherman on an angled stilt, his line in the water. I run to the seashore and begin snapping photos, just as I did in my 20s. After a few minutes, the fisherman leaves his post and joins me on the beach.

Fishing, Sarawe Barallum tells me, has been bad; there have been no sardines or barracuda, his staple catch, for many days. As to why, he can only speculate. Tons of fish were washed ashore by the tsunami; much of the reef was destroyed; the fish may simply be frightened of the area. In any event, there is nothing.

Morning is the best time to catch fish, and I’m eager to learn how Koggala’s fishermen survived the waves.

“The tsunami came two weeks ago,” Barallum explains. “It was a full moon. We do not fish on that day, which is the monthly poya [celebration] for Lord Buddha. For this reason we were not in the water — and we did not die.”

But Barallum’s remarks are deceptive. Though Koggala’s stilt fishermen were spared, Tiger Village — a fishing community a bit farther south, built 15 years ago — was annihilated by the tsunami.

The following morning, I meet three Australians from Perth, all of Sri Lankan descent. One of the men is a financial consultant; the other man, and woman, are doctors. They’ve raised nearly $20,000 in private donations, and used the money to buy what they thought would be essential relief supplies. Their white van is filled with a potpourri of items: cases of infant formula, bottles of chlorine solution, soccer balls, disposable diapers, cricket bats, dolls, hard candies, nursing bottles, and bangles. We follow them north along the coast, stopping at makeshift refugee camps to hand out supplies. I watch from the sidelines as Nila Chandratilake, the broker, shows a small group of local women how to purify drinking water. The lessons are given in a wooden shanty, built from planks recovered from the beach.

Like myself, these people have traveled down this road before; and they, too, are staggered by how the region has been transformed by this vast crisis. But Isha Prematilaka, a doctor living in Perth, feels that her impromptu road trip has transformed her, as well. The telling moment came when she handed a little boy a soccer ball. He ran into his refugee tent, returned, and pressed a roll of mints into her hand.

“Whatever we give,” she says, “we get back 10 times more. I am learning so much from these people — about strength, courage and moving on. You don’t see anybody sitting around, wailing. They are working to rebuild their lives.”

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This is the first of Jeff Greenwald’s dispatches from Sri Lanka. For information about how you can help the victims of the tsunami, click here.

“It’s too much trouble to change my flight.”

“The airline would understand,” Velo frowned.

“I know.” I plucked my travel clock from the nightstand, and slipped it into my toiletry kit. “But I have a meeting. As awful as it sounds, I have to be in America by Tuesday.”

Outside my window, the sun glittered on the Celebes Sea. Velo and I were standing in my hotel room in Indonesia, where I’d just completed a two-week assignment for Outside magazine. Riots in Jakarta, and the threat of reprisals against Americans, had earned the most populous Islamic nation in the world a grim travel warning from the U.S. State Department. This was the last place on earth my mother would want me to be.

Yet few places in the world had ever seemed safer, or more welcoming and friendly. Remaining in Sulawesi was a lovely thought; it was the idea of returning to the United States, with its post-9/11 hysteria and militarism, that filled me with dread.

Today, with the United States blasting its way to Baghdad in a war that has polarized our citizens and appalled much of the world, the notion of traveling anywhere may seem preposterous. I take the opposite view. There has never been a better time for Americans to travel, or a more important time for us to do so.

I say this not because hotel rates are low, or travel meccas like Nepal and Bali are blissfully uncrowded, or desperate airlines are practically giving away tickets. It’s my conviction that, if we hope to arrest the damage wreaked by the Bush administration and salvage whatever goodwill remains on this planet, we have to get out of our bunkers and meet the world’s inhabitants. And they have to meet us.

As the world knows from watching TV footage of boisterous antiwar demonstrations in San Francisco, New York and other homefront cities, not all Americans support the shock and awe being rained on Iraq by the Bush administration. Citizens of countries from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East, accustomed to governments of corrupt and self-interested bureaucrats, are well aware that Americans are not synonymous with their leaders — especially our present leaders, who assumed power in what many educated people, from Italy to Iceland, interpreted as a corporate coup d’état.

For months leading up to the war, the hawk lobby in Washington and in the media did its best to demean France, Germany and other countries opposed to invading Iraq and instill an us-vs.-them feeling in the American public. It wasn’t a hard sell. Like the rest of the human race, Americans are subject to primal impulses rooted in eons of tribal behavior. It doesn’t take much to throw us back to our old habits: snorting at outsiders and stomping around the fire pit while “sheltering in place.” There is nothing the White House would rather see than a nation of shut-ins, held hostage by fear and animosity. George W. Bush may have set foreign policy back 50 years — but he’s turning our global consciousness back 40,000.

Despite all this, America itself, as opposed to the cabal that has hijacked it, is still widely admired and respected. People are fascinated by our country and its high and low obsessions. In February, as I traveled through Burma and Thailand, Michael Jackson and the Columbia disaster were front-page news. If I mentioned to a Thai (or a traveling European) that I was from the U.S., the reaction was consistent: “America! Great country! But hey — who’s this Bush cowboy, and what does he think he’s doing?”

This was true six weeks ago. How true will it be six weeks in the future, as images of death, destruction and orphaned children continue to saturate the global airwaves? No one can say. One lesson we are learning from the Bush administration is that a handful of supremely arrogant people can create enormous, possibly irreversible harm — and they can do it very quickly.

I see travel as an antidote to this mess. If our leaders are degrading the image of America and Americans, we have to restore that image with dialogue and eye contact. If our own diplomats are forbidden to express their displeasure with this administration’s policies, you and I must take their positions in the field. And if our sense of the world is withering away, starved by the scraps of information we are so selectively fed, we must gorge ourselves on the feast of overseas travel.

Despite the illusion of worldwide awareness created by satellite television and the Internet, nothing compares with actually walking the streets of foreign lands and talking to local residents. Our perspective on our world and its people is narrowed by a news industry that, like our government, thrives on anger and anxiety: television graphics of crude country maps outlined in flames or emblazoned with tanks and war planes. To travel with open eyes is to redraw those maps, and connect with the human faces and universal concerns behind the cardboard cutouts on the evening news.

In August 1999, I traveled to Iran to write about the millennium’s last total solar eclipse for Salon. When I arrived, I broke from my small American group, choosing to watch the event from Esfahan’s huge public square. The vast plaza was packed with more than 50,000 Iranians. There were reporters and cameras from all over Persia, Europe and Central Asia. Shortly before the miraculous moment when Iran would be cast in shadow, a demonstration erupted across the square. Banners were lofted and American flags set afire as scores of demonstrators chanted anti-U.S. slogans. The cameras muscled in, and the noisy rant was prominently featured in news reports across the world. For millions of viewers, this was just the latest eruption of rage from Iran: a nation of fist-waving extremists, with an undying grudge against the Great Satan.

Here’s what those viewers didn’t see: the moment the demonstration began, all the Iranians in my vicinity — men, women and young people — moved toward the visiting American, forming a protective ring around me and my gear. One man put his hand on my shoulder, assuring me that I was safe. Another poked my arm, and sneered at the pack of demonstrators. “They should get a job,” he muttered.

In an era where communication has become almost borderless, the Bush administration is isolating America, and Americans, from the planetary community. Our most important challenge is to reverse this trend. Travel — more than anything else we can do as individuals — shatters that isolation, and forges bridges of goodwill and understanding. A conscious traveler is nothing less than an ambassador-at-large: a voice and presence with astonishing power, able to shatter the spiral of suspicion, and to honor the humanity of everyone he or she might encounter.

As an American traveler, one faces tough questions about our government’s unilateralism, the Kyoto Accords, the export of pesticides, our gun culture and the death penalty, among others. How we reply, surprisingly, is actually not so important. In my experience, the main purpose of these queries is to get us to listen. For though it may seem preposterous, people in developing countries — and throughout much of Europe — sincerely believe that having the ear of an American is tantamount to having the ear of America.

They’re absolutely right. As we all know, Americans who travel are very vocal about their experiences. An intense dialogue with an Egyptian teacher; a cup of chai with a Tibetan refugee — we might share these encounters with dozens of friends, who pass them on. Some anecdotes even branch out through the Internet, adding to the popular wisdom about countries and cultures far removed from our own. A simple story about a Tehran shopkeeper — who presses a cassette tape of traditional Iranian music into the hands of an American visitor, refusing any payment — can counteract months of dehumanizing propaganda about the “axis of evil.”

How can we take the lessons of travel, and roll them over into positive action? Over the past few months, I’ve set out to explore these questions. The result has been the creation of an international online community called Ethical Traveler. I launched this Web site for everyone who has traveled — whether on a monthlong trek across the Himalayas or a three-day cruise around the Bahamas — and believes that travel has expanded their worldview. It’s for those of us whose journeys, long or short, have inspired deeper concerns for this planet and its people. Ultimately, it will become a forum through which travelers can join their voices, and take actions that make this world a more open and welcoming place.

The community is in its formative stages, but it’s growing fast. Travel and tourism is the largest industry on earth — and I’m confident that, someday, an alliance of open-eyed travelers will have at least as much power as an association of rifle owners. Meanwhile, keep your passports current, pull out your maps, and — as soon as possible — consider a vacation far from the security of the homeland. Those frequent-flyer miles will never be more valuable than they are right now.