"No, no, I don't want that," she says were her thoughts. "That's not why I did it."

Recognized in February by Mayor Ron Gonzales during his State of the City address, Almaden's Dharmasena was uncomfortable accepting praise for something she considered as something she had to do.

"I was the one who benefited the most," she says.

She reconciled it in her head, saying she believes that she was a representative of a community of people who, like her, were giving their time, effort or money to the South Asia tsunami relief efforts. The disaster took the lives of at least a quarter of a million people across the expanse of the Indian Ocean.

The Dec. 26 tsunami, which began in Indonesia, quickly spread to Dharmasena's homeland of Sri Lanka. Watching the surmounting tragedy unfold on TV, she said it struck her hard.

"I said, 'I can't watch. I've got to go do something,'" she recalls. She knew her services would be invaluable to the ailing island nation where she was raised and where her parents still live. Contacting the organizing offices at Kaiser Permanente, she made arrangements to be away from her practice as an obstetrician-gynecologist at Kaiser Santa Teresa and volunteered to join Kaiser's relief efforts plan.

Dharmasena also made preparations to be away from her husband and two young children. She doesn't regret leaving behind her family for 21Ž2 weeks, though she says it was difficult to do.

"I'm so glad I did it and that I didn't give excuses," she says.

Volunteer work is not unusual to this Stanford graduate and it is something that the school she attended strongly promotes, she says.

"They teach you that it's important to give back to the community," Dharmasena says.

Oftentimes those students whose homes were far away would stay behind at the school during holiday breaks and perform community service.

"But I have never done anything like [the tsunami relief effort] before in my life," she says.

Dharmasena has been in the United States for 20 years and is now a U.S. citizen. On this return journey to Sri Lanka, she first spent a day with her parents in the western city of Colombo, then traveled with another Kaiser doctor, eventually meeting up with a Kaiser nurse who is also originally from Sri Lanka. The trio made their way across the island nation to Arugam Bay and Pottuvil, a sandy-beach region known as a surfing capital.

She later would learn that a cousin who also now lives in California was vacationing with friends at a hotel in Arugam Bay that was demolished by the tsunami survived the waves by holding tightly to the top of a coconut tree. The hotel manager later told Dharmasena that all that remained of the building was the foundation, three spoons and a bowl.

The huge waves had washed out many roads there, making travel difficult. The roads along the flatter coastal route were impassable, and the three-person Kaiser delegation was forced to maneuver over the mountainous central region. During their journey they were slowed by an elephant that decided to take a break in the bumpy one-lane road.

Thinking that she was prepared for what she would see when they arrived, Dharmasena soon learned she had never seen firsthand devastation like that.

"I never saw such poverty," she says.

Standing on a beach she remembers visiting when she was a child, Dharmasena says she looked to her left and saw nothing but rubble, and everything to her right was flattened.

"I looked down and I saw children's toys, a toothbrush, a spoon," she says.

The main occupations are fishing and farming in Pottuvil and the villages there have been completely destroyed, leaving behind no buildings suitable to use as a hospital.

Relief efforts were barely underway when Dharmasena arrived, and no clinic had been established for her and the other volunteers to work in, so she made some contacts and found a makeshift hospital that wanted their help in Pottuvil.

"We also took our doctor boxes and went to other clinics" that sometimes had lines of 200 people, she says. There were no laboratories in the villages, and they had no way to run standard diagnostic tests.

"What you have is your clinical judgment," Dharmasena says. "There was a lot of influenza, a lot of skin diseases."

What she also had was compassion. That and kindness can heal a lot of wounds, she says.

And she met many people who held those virtues as well; people who came from all walks of life and from many different countries, such as Canada, Iceland and Spain. Many were not even medical professionals. One man who impressed her was an electrician from Spain who came not knowing what he would do when he got there but he was determined to help.

The generosity of villagers and other medical teams in the area amazed her. Even though they didn't know one another and were not affiliated, they would share medications when asked.

"People were sharing rides [with strangers] and we were invited to lunch by locals [on a regular basis]," Dharmasena says.

People like the Spanish electrician and other relief workers touched her heart, she says, but the people who tugged most at her heartstrings were the children of the villages.

"They are so resilient," Dharmasena says.

Marveling at the ability of the children to move beyond the destruction and loss, she says it helped her get through her own sadness.

The patients she saw there were very grateful for the help they received, and Dharmasena says that it helped the image of America and Americans, too.

"I don't want to be branded as stingy. I'm an American now and I know how much we do as a nation," Dharmasena says.

Getting down to the basics, for her, was a return to what getting into medicine was all about in the first place: helping people.

Dharmasena's been back in the United States for a couple of months now and she says she looks at things a little differently. She tries to get to know her patients a little more.

"Coming back, it was a reverse culture shock," Dharmasena says. "You take for granted that everything here is perfect."