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KXAN’s DeSilva reports from Sri Lanka
It took him 39 hours to get to work when KXAN’s R.J. DeSilva flew to Sri Lanka to cover the relief efforts after the tragic tsunamis washed away thousands of people and their homes.
In case you’re wondering, the route to halfway-around-the-world took them from Austin to Chicago to Paris to Dubai to Sri Lanka. DeSilva and photojournalist Frank Martinez spent a week there before returning last weekend.
Talk about jet lag . . .
The weekend anchor/weekday reporter, whose father is Sri Lankan and who still has relatives living there, filed reports via e-mail, posted on KXAN.com under the title “Dispatches From the Disaster,” and filed voice reports by phone.
The KXAN newscast reports started Tuesday of this week and continue tonight and Sunday at 10 p.m.
DeSilva said he and Martinez were prepared for the worst, after seeing all the television coverage that preceded their trip.
“But we actually saw less than we had expected,” DeSilva said. “Burial of the dead was mostly done before we got there. We were braced for that, but didn’t get it. Of course the extent of the devastation and the debris was shocking.”
Most of their stories were filed from the southern city of Galle, where long stretches of coastal dwellings were wiped out.
“The governor of the province pointed out that what we were seeing was about a quarter of what was there before — and that’s frightening,” said DeSilva, adding that he agrees with one U.S. Marine’s assessment of the situation as “humbling.”
DeSilva, 37, was born in Washington, D.C., but lived in Sri Lanka for several years in the ’80s. KXAN, which is owned by Rhode Island-based LIN Television, suggested he cover the disaster not long after it happened Dec. 26. His reports were available to all of LIN’s 24 stations, but it is unclear which ones used them.
This isn’t DeSilva’s first overseas assignment for KXAN. He went to Bosnia to cover the peace-keeping troops that were sent from the Austin area a few years ago. The University of Maryland graduate came to KXAN as a reporter in ‘96 from a station in Dover, Del.
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