Rising After Ditwah
Rising After Ditwah: How Serendibs Minnesota Answered Sri Lanka’s Call
A Serendibs Minnesota Flood Relief Initiative — Cyclonic Storm Ditwah, November 2025
There’s a particular kind of helplessness that comes from watching home flood while you’re an ocean away.
For the Sri Lankan community here in Minnesota, that’s exactly what late November 2025 felt like. The news arrived in fragments. A cyclone, then rising water, then names of districts we knew by heart. Gampaha. Colombo. Kandy. Places where our families live, where we grew up, where memory itself is stored. And all we could do was watch.
But watching was never going to be enough.
When the Water Came
Cyclonic Storm Ditwah made landfall on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast on November 28, 2025. What followed was some of the worst flooding the island had seen in nearly twenty years. The rain didn’t stop. The ground gave way. Landslides swallowed hillsides, and rivers reclaimed the towns built along them.
By the end, the numbers were almost too large to feel. More than 2 million people affected. Hundreds of lives lost. Families still searching for the missing. Over 600,000 families displaced, with more than 1,000 emergency shelters thrown together to hold those who suddenly had nowhere left to go.
Every one of Sri Lanka’s 25 districts flooded. The places hit hardest, Gampaha, Colombo, Puttalam, Mannar, Kandy, Badulla, and Matale, saw homes go under, bridges collapse, and roads simply vanish beneath the current. Behind each of those statistics is a family that went to sleep with a home and woke up without one.
We Couldn’t Be There. So We Did This.
Serendibs Minnesota started this flood relief project for a simple reason. We couldn’t stand on those flooded streets ourselves, but we could make sure help arrived in our place.
And it did, because people gave. Donors and community members opened their hearts and their wallets, and that generosity became something real. Rice and lentils. Clean drinking water. Mattresses for families sleeping on wet floors. Medicine for the sick. Meals for those who’d lost their kitchens entirely.
None of it happened by accident. Volunteers handled the unglamorous, essential work. Buying supplies, loading trucks, navigating roads that had washed out, and coordinating with people on the ground in Sri Lanka who knew exactly which families had been forgotten by everyone else. They made sure the help didn’t stop at “raised.” It made it all the way to a doorstep.
Where Your Help Landed
Relief reached families across five of the worst hit regions, with each community receiving what it needed most:
- Kurunegala — drinking water, dry ration packs, and medicine
- Kandy — drinking water, dry ration packs, and medicine
- Matale — drinking water, dry ration packs, and prepared meals
- Gampola — mattresses, bedding, bedsheets, and towels
- Marawila / Wennappuwa — dry ration packs and medicine
A dry bed. A clean drink of water. A meal that didn’t have to be rationed. Small things, until they’re the only things you don’t have.
Every Rupee, Accounted For
We believe trust is earned in the details, so here is exactly what came in and where it went. Most of our funds were raised through a GoFundMe campaign alongside direct donations, converted at a rate of 303 LKR per USD.
What we raised
Our community gave $11,314.00 in total. After GoFundMe’s fees, $9,018.96 came through from that campaign, and a deeply generous direct donation of $2,000.00 from Lasantha Fernando brought our total net funds available to $11,006.70. You can view the campaign here: https://www.gofundme.com/manage/help-sri-lanka-emergency-flood-relief
What we spent
Total relief expenses came to $11,116.76, which left a remaining balance of negative $110.06. In other words, we gave everything, and then a little more.
Here’s the full breakdown of where the money went, in Sri Lankan rupees:
| Category | Amount (LKR) |
|---|---|
| Mattresses, Bed Sheets & Towels | 1,902,075 |
| Dry Rations | 532,756 |
| Drinking Water | 192,150 |
| Transport | 158,100 |
| Prepared Food | 105,025 |
| Volunteer Meals & Refreshments | 85,255 |
| Fuel | 55,808 |
| Medicine | 20,750 |
Full receipts, the complete expense report, and distribution records are available for anyone who wants to see them. We mean it when we say transparency. It’s the least we owe the people who trusted us.
Thank You, and We Mean It
To every person who donated, who shared the campaign, who showed up to pack boxes or make a single phone call: thank you. You turned distance into action. You proved that being far from home doesn’t mean being far from the people in it.
To Lasantha Fernando, and to every donor whose name we may not know, your generosity is sitting in someone’s home right now. A dry mattress. A full water bottle. A little more hope than there was the week before.
Serendibs Minnesota will keep showing up, fully, honestly, and together, whenever our community needs us. This time, the water rose. And so did we.
Have questions about this project, or want to see the supporting documentation? Please reach out. We’d be glad to share more.