Sri Lankan child in US chips in to help children here

Fundraiser generates over $ 700:

Like most eight-year-olds, Bazil Anandaraj Ratnam enjoys sugary candies and television cartoons.

Yet Bazil is anything but typical when it comes to a young boy’s appreciation of Christmas.

Aside from a book or two, the Olmsted School 64 third-grader had made no requests of Santa — or his parents — this holiday season. No video games, no toys, not even a bicycle.

Bazil simply has no interest. Instead, he says, Christmas is “a giving time of year” and people should be thinking of others.

The son of Sri Lankan immigrants, Bazil in recent weeks found himself thinking of children in Sri Lanka who don’t have books or proper school supplies.

And he decided to help them.

At first, he planned to send the money he had collected in his piggy bank and from doing chores at home — about $20.

But when his mother, Christobel, explained that such a gift wasn’t big enough to make it worth sending around the world, Bazil’s response was to raise more.

So, with the help of his parents, their church and his dad’s employer, he organized a fundraising dinner and raffle that generated more than $700 for schoolchildren in Sri Lanka and Malaysia — two countries devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed an estimated 275,000 people.

And along the way, he helped reclaim some of the joy of Christmas in the Ratnam household.

Ever since the tsunami, which occurred the day after Christmas, the holiday season has been anything but joyous for Bazil’s father, Antony.

The deadly waves, which hit the fishing village where Antony was raised, killed his mother.

Antony was devastated by her death. He felt helpless to assist the survivors in his native land, and he felt somewhat guilty about having avoided the calamity altogether.

“Christmas comes and I’m always upset. I don’t like to talk on that day with anyone,” said Antony. For the past several years, Antony didn’t even mind working on Christmas — it helped him avoid thinking about what happened in 2004.

And he couldn’t bring himself to put up a Christmas tree.

The joy has been slowly returning, though, thanks in part to his son’s unusual effort, which began only a few weeks ago.

Bazil asked his dad one day about what schools were like in Sri Lanka. Antony explained and Bazil drafted a letter, which he passed around to instructors at the Global Book Hour in the Amherst Street Wegmans, a program he regularly attends on Saturdays.

Buffalow News