Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar People are surveyed in the new corrugated sheet metal housing that was erected to replace dwellings that were swept out to sea by the tsunami. Click photo for larger image.

They all mention the clothing.

The tattered shirts and soggy dresses, piled on a mass grave, that no one will touch no matter how much they need something to wear.

The kids with no clothes running through filth in the streets.

The boxes of shoes waiting to be sorted while children go barefoot.

They also talk of the emergency tin shelters that have become permanent homes, the people infected by contaminated water and the chilling story of School 59, which had that name before the tsunami and lost 59 students to the swirling waves.

These lingering memories are shared by three groups of Pittsburgh-based students who found themselves along the same small stretch of India coastline in March hoping to help victims of the December tsunami. Coincidence brought the students together in southeastern India -- by virtue of birth in one case, research in another, serendipity in the third. Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar was born in Chennai, India, but left as a young child for the United States. She studied in North Carolina, is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Florida and recently started working as a coordinator of student programs at Carnegie Mellon University.

When the tsunami hit coastlines throughout the Indian Ocean, she was an adviser for Mayur, a South Asian student group at CMU. The group's annual cultural show needed a caterer, and a restaurant offered to provide food at cost if the proceeds were donated to tsunami relief. This motivated Rajakumar to start raising money for tsunami victims from other sources as well.

She contacted non-government organizations about going to India to volunteer her time but was told that she would need to stay a few months -- time she could not spare. So she decided to organize a trip herself to see how she might best lend aid.

Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar A boy and his grandmother are interviewed about the tsunami. Click photo for larger image.

Rajakumar began to tap friends and family members. She found major donors in Sridhar Tayur, a professor at CMU's Tepper School of Business, in the Westside Baptist Church of Gainesville, Fla., and in the Pittsburgh-based Brothers Brother Foundation. After days of dialing and pleading and holding a benefit auction, Rajakumar and her friends had raised almost $13,000.

And so while many college students were off on spring break chilling in Cancun or cable-surfing in their parents' dens, Rajakumar, her student assistant, two friends from Florida and a substitute teacher from Orlando set off for Chennai to see what they could do.

On their first morning in the large port city -- before they'd had a chance to start scouting the nearby village of Karaikal, where the team hoped to work with orphans -- the University of Pittsburgh's Semester at Sea boat docked for a scheduled stop. Thirty-five students from Pitt and other universities across the country went with Rajakumar and helped organize games for abandoned children in the city.

"It was coincidental that they happened to be in port at Chennai at same time that CMU students were going to be there," said Semester at Sea spokeswoman Leigh Ann Wojciechowski. But CEO John Tymitz said he hopes Semester at Sea students will continue to work with Rajakumar's nascent organization in Chennai.

Rajakumar would like to see that happen, too. She and her friends spent a week in Chennai and Karaikal. They toured sites where displaced families were living and volunteered to help children who had been orphaned by the tsunami.

Their plan is to establish a relationship between the orphans in Karaikal and American children and to organize ways that college students in Pittsburgh and other parts of the United States can help with local reconstruction projects and teach villagers useful trades.

She's leading another trip back to India in June, bringing another round of Carnegie Mellon undergraduates to help rebuild the area. While they will have spent all the money that they raised on these trips and relief efforts, she'll start fundraising again when she returns.

"The goal was never just a week," Rajakumar said. "The point of the week was to be able to do something long term."

In the meantime, two Kevins from CMU had started organizing their own relief efforts within hours of seeing the tsunami crash ashore on their TV sets.

Kevin Griffith, a former Peace Corps volunteer, founded the Tsunami Assistance Project and quickly recruited Kevin Fleming, a fellow student at the H.J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, to help him.

The Kevins solicited friends and friends of friends and anyone else they could think of, turning TAP into a well-oiled fund-raising machine that so far has collected more than $50,000.

Griffith took a leave of absence from the Heinz school and flew to India three short weeks after the tsunami. He was joined by two other former Peace Corps volunteers while Fleming stayed in Pittsburgh to organize a team of five graduate students to keep raising money.Griffith traveled up and down the coast of India looking for an appropriate village where TAP could focus its efforts.

He settled on Nagappattinam, a small village near Karaikal. The team in India wants to organize small-scale reconstruction projects while bringing the story of Nagappattinam's revival back to the United States. They've set up a partnership with an Indian organization and hope to build a community center for children.

Back in Pittsburgh, Fleming heard about Rajakumar and her plans to visit India from a mutual acquaintance at CMU. They met, and he showed her where TAP planned to begin its work -- very near to where she had been born.

Griffith and his TAP colleagues in India then hooked up with Rajakumar and her group in Nagappattinam last month.

Like Rajakumar, they want not only to provide short-term help for the people of Nagappattiam, where they now reside, they also want to connect them with donors in the United States. They have set up a user-friendly Web site, www.tapindia.org, where the team in India writes an online journal on their progress.

"We're trying to use technology as a way to put a face to the people receiving aid," said Fleming. "We feel like that's a connection that's often missed."