Nineteen-year-old Emory sophomore Reena Panjwani was ecstatic about her trip to Sri Lanka during winter break. She had been doing research with a professor who studied the Dutch Burghers, colonists who settled in Sri Lanka. When she learned that her family planned to visit family friends in Sri Lanka, Panjwani jumped at the chance to join them. On December 18, she flew with her father, stepmother and two half brothers to Bombay, India. After spending a few days in her father's native land, the family flew to Colombo, Sri Lanka, on December 22. They proceeded to take a long and harrowing trip through the country to finally reach the village of Thalpe, a beautiful coastal paradise where her father's friends had just built a beach house.

"It was such a stressful trip to get there," she recalls. "But when we got there, we thought, wow, this is totally perfect. This is heaven on earth. We had no idea that three days later it would be hell on earth."

For three days, Panjwani and her family enjoyed the house, the beach and the tropical weather that made them forget the worries and stresses of daily life back home. "It was just beautiful. You really couldn't be upset while you were there. It was so relaxing," she says.

The days flew by, and before she knew it, Panjwani was laying in bed on the morning of December 26, contemplating when she should get up to pack for their trip back to Bombay that day. And that's when her dream vacation turned into a nightmare.

"All of a sudden, I heard people screaming outside, and really loud waves crashing. My stepmom came banging on the door, shouting, 'Reena get up, run, run!'" She fled the house, running as fast as she could as a 20-foot wall of water overtook the beach and everything in its path. "People were really confused," she says. "Nobody really knew what was going on. Beyond the street was a jungle of trees, and the water just swept us up into the trees." Unable to grab a tree, Panjwani was submerged under the water for a minute, though she says it felt like hours. Suddenly, a hand emerged, pulling her into the safety of a tree. It was one of the houseboys who worked at the beach house.

"At that point, I couldn't see my family, and I broke down. Suddenly, my dad and stepmom appeared out of the water. They were screaming, 'Where are the boys?'" The terror of the situation was overwhelming, she says. "The water started to recede a little bit, and I could hear my [2-year-old] brother, Evan, crying. He was 20 feet away, hanging onto a tree by himself ... My other brother was helped by someone off a tree. It was surreal."

When the family was finally reunited, they joined their host friends and trekked four miles inland, hoping to get to safety. Panjwani remembers the selflessness of the Sri Lankan people who stayed with their family: "The houseboys who helped around the house—they had families around the coast. But they didn't leave us the whole time, which was amazing. Everybody was looking out for each other at that point," she says.

Eventually, they reached the home of a British expatriate who offered them shelter for the night. Everything they had brought with them to Sri Lanka was either lost or destroyed. When the Panjwanis finally left for home a few days later, the death toll was in the thousands.

"We're just so lucky that wasn't our home," she says. "The people who lived there lost everything." To express their gratefulness, Panjwani's family and friends have created a trust fund for the Sri Lankans who saved their lives. "The guy who pulled me over the tree—he lost his entire house and livelihood."

And though she's trying to move on with her life, Panjwani certainly hasn't forgotten the experience. She says it has changed her forever. Back at Emory, she shared her story at an event dedicated to raising money for the victims. "It's changed my view of life. I feel like we were saved for some sort of reason. We must have some greater purpose in life. Before this trip, I was questioning the whole premed thing, but now I definitely want to do it and give back."

unita Kini-Tandon, a commercial litigator from New York City, and her husband, Dev Tandon, arrived in Phuket, Thailand, on Christmas Day. They had planned a relaxing and exotic two-week vacation around Thailand to escape from the harried stress of city life. "It was beautiful, the people were really friendly, the resort was gorgeous, the weather was perfect," she says. "That one day was one of the best we've had. It was almost to good to be true." On the morning of the 26th, the couple ate breakfast and went to relax on the beach. Kini-Tandon pulled out a book while her husband decided to walk down the shore to explore the coast.

"Within five minutes, I heard everyone screaming, 'Run!'" she says. "You didn't have time to think. I just ran." As she made her way inland, she bruised herself, hitting her legs on anything that came in her way. After the second wave came, Kini-Tandon was terrified because she had no idea where her husband was. "I was stupid enough to go back to the beach to look for him." When she couldn't find him, she eventually made it back to their hotel, the Sheraton Luxury Collection, where other people had congregated. The resort next to theirs had been completely devastated, but parts of the Sheraton were still intact. Kini-Tandon sat in the hotel lobby crying, waiting for her husband for one hour. "An hour doesn't seem like a long time, but in this case, every minute lasts forever," she says. Finally, she was reunited with Tandon, who eventually made it back to the hotel wearing two mismatched flip-flops he had grabbed from the floating debris.

While many other vacationers left the country as soon as they could, Kini-Tandon and her husband decided to stay in Thailand as long as they planned. But instead of sipping cool drinks on the beach and eating local Thai food, the couple went to work. "We stayed as long as we were supposed to stay. We went to a couple of restaurants on the beach and helped them clean up and rebuild stuff. Dev made a dozen trips back and forth to the beach to make sure everything was OK." He also donated blood at city hall.

Despite all their efforts, when they finally returned to the United States, they still felt they hadn't done enough. As the watched the death toll rise on TV each day, they were horrified. "We felt guilty," she says. "Why are we OK and not anybody else?" So she and her husband have committed themselves to donating as much as they can to the region. "The only good thing that comes out of it is it makes you appreciate things more. We'd love to take a week to go help out, and it makes us think that we should be doing more—not just for tsunami relief, but for anything." The couple made a substantial donation to the relief effort, more than they could afford. "We'll have to be very careful [financially] for six months, but it's important."

And while many people might be afraid to ever visit that region of the world again, the Tandons are now committed to doing just that. "The Thai people are so optimistic. They have a very positive culture," says Kini-Tandon. Because they know the Thai economy has been crippled by the disaster, the couple wants to return to country to help revive it. "We'd like to back soon, within the next year or two. It's the least we can do."

ershey Jayasuriya, a senior at the University of Michigan, was flipping through the TV channels one Sunday morning in Ann Arbor. When she first heard about the tsunami, she didn't think much of it. As the day went on, she realized that it was a very serious situation. Jayasuriya, who was born in Sri Lanka and still had family there, became worried when she learned that Sri Lanka was one of the countries that had been affected. "My mom was with me in Ann Arbor, and she kept saying that nothing could have happened to our family. The way the news was portraying it, it seemed like it hit the east coast of the island, but our family is on the west coast."

The next day, when they tried to call their family in Sri Lanka, they realized that the west coast had, indeed, been affected. Soon after, they learned that Jayasuriya's grandmother and aunt were killed in the disaster. Jayasuriya had to set her grief aside so she could console her mother, who went into shock upon hearing the news. "It wasn't until about two weeks after that it kind of hit me, and I was in the car and I broke down and started crying," she says.

But instead of simply wallowing in her sadness and despair, Jayasuriya went into action. She began emailing her friends and student groups on campus to organize a roundtable discussion on how they could help victims of the tsunami. Beth Bovair, another student at Michigan, was sending similar emails, and the two connected. They planned a meeting on the first day of winter classes at U-M. Bovair and Jayasuriya were expecting representatives from about 30 groups on campus. By the first 15 minutes of the meeting, 150 people had congregated in the basement of the Michigan Union.

The result of that meeting was the formation of Tsunami Aid, a campus-wide organization that serves as a resource for other student organizations to collaborate in coordinating tsunami aid events on campus. Since its inception, Tsunami Aid has helped U-M campus groups raise thousands of dollars. In April, the group will sponsor a battle of the bands event to raise money and keep tsunami awareness alive.

Tsunami Aid is helping Jayasuriya work through her grief. At a campus vigil, she was asked to share her loss. Jayasuriya spoke about how the tragedy has helped unify so many people. "The concepts of pain, love and happiness are all universal. That's why this has really affected everybody, and I think it's really important to remember that for an effort like this to continue, it takes a global movement. Working together is what our organization is about," she says. "The main thing is that an event like this, as tragic as it is, can bring people together. We've seen it on this campus and we're seeing it globally. It has really connected a lot of people."