Through devastation with the relief convoy

This is the end of the aid pipeline, the last link in the long chain from the hearts and wallets of the British public to the mouths and stomachs of Sri Lanka's tsunami victims. In this part of the world, the £72million-plus donated, the television appeals with David Dimbleby and the floods of donations to the Oxfam shops all come down to a line of sweating Sri Lankan university students, handing out food parcels with bits of packing tape stuck to their clothes.

We are at a rather flashy Buddhist temple near the town of Weligama, temporary refuge to dozens of families who have lost their homes. Teenage trainee monks, in their orange and red robes, cluster round this morning as Save the Children, a leading member of the Disasters Emergency Committee, gives out its first major assistance in this horribly stricken town on Sri Lanka's destroyed southern coast.

The distribution is orderly. Clutching their ration cards, the people line up to have their names ticked off a list before they are given three days' supplies of soya beans, biscuits, tea and canned mackerel in a green plastic bag.

TV pictures may show scrums of people fighting round lorries and American crewmen tossing aid off the backs of helicopters, but professional aid workers scoff at this sort of thing.

"There is a temptation to go straight in and throw it off the back of the truck," says Colin Blyth, Save the Children's Sri Lanka logistical mastermind.

"But you cause a riot and it doesn't go to the people who really need it. The ones who do really need it - the children, the elderly,

the disabled - aren't strong enough to push to the front of the crowd."

With criticism being heard of the aid effort's alleged slowness, the Evening Standard has spent the last 72 hours following this Save the Children convoy on its journey of several days from source to sufferers to find out how an operation like this actually works.

Like most subjects, aid is a lot more complicated than it looks on TV.

The first thing is that the aid we are transporting has been nowhere near an airport.

Contrary to public perception, most aid does not fly in on a big jumbo jet - this stuff was bought, on the Save the Children credit card, from Sri Lanka's equivalent of the cashand-carry.

"This is not Africa," said Gareth Owen, the charity's emergency team leader, who flew in, with others, at a day's notice to help the existing network of local staff.

"People at home have the idea that there is nothing here, but there is a functioning infrastructure. We're not bringing in sacks

of rice on transport planes. The vast majority of what we need, we can get locally."

This aid started its journey in the warehouses of Colombo merchants on Friday.

As we talk on Sunday afternoon in Save the Children's Colombo offices, the packets of two-minute noodles, canned fish, dried soya and water are being stacked up into trucks below us.

Among the volunteers doing the loading is Vasantha Moragoda, the host of Sri Lanka's leading satirical TV show.

This is somehow deeply bizarre - one can imagine Paul Merton or Ian Hislop recording a charity record, but not rolling up their sleeves and helping to load the noodles.

"There is a fair amount of planning but also a fair amount of guesswork, to be honest," says Blyth, who got the call to come at 8am on Boxing Day and was airborne 12 hours later.

He is currently in a frenzied round of meetings with Sri Lankan bureaucrats and transport officials.

In one of the more malign legacies of the British Empire, this remains the land of the carbon copy and the rubber stamp. "It makes it easier and it makes it harder," says Blyth. "It is a bit slower, but it is handled by professionals.

"I think I prefer this way - but ask me again tomorrow."

The truck we will ride on, registration 48-3947, is proudly decorated with the British Leyland logo - Sri Lanka Ashok Leyland is still a big brand here - and its cab is cheered up by a fetching blue Christmas tinsel and a bunch of plastic flowers.

Add the in-vehicle tea-making facilities - a billy-can over the throbbing engine - and 48-3947 is all loaded and ready to go by 9am yesterday.

However, Sri Lankan bureaucratic delays mean we do not actually leave until 1.25 in the afternoon.

The A2 road to Matara, along the coast, is open, though in places it looks like those Second World War pictures of roads running through the rubble of Dresden.

We are diverted away down narrow byways four times because bridges have been cut or chunks gouged out by the tide, brushing the sides of the country lanes as other trucks and buses squeeze past.

The traffic is heavy, though still not with much aid. It is a smooth, but very slow, ride.

Without a stop, we arrive in Matara - just a hundred miles from Colombo - at 8.50pm, seven and a half hours later, three hours behind schedule, and at an average speed of 13 mph.

There are no Te s c o - s t y le logistics operations here, no forklift t r ucks, no warehouses with pallets. Evening Standard helps unload the four relatively small lorries in our convoy by hand - a task that even with 20 people helping takes more than three hours. You don't understand how time-consuming it all is until you've done it yourself. It's now midnight on Monday, and it still isn't the end of the road.

"Now we have to divide them up into individual family rat ions," says Lakshman Thantridge, the local coordinator.

"That will take most of Tuesday. So we will start distributing most of it on Wednesday."

Like all the aid profess i o n a l s , Thantridge and the rest of the team at Colombo HQ are feeling the pressure not just of the disaster itself, but of the weight of public expectation represented by that gigantic £72 million donation.

They need to explain why it takes time. And they feel there are some other things that need to be explained to the expectant donors. "People are not, on the whole, starving here," explains Unicef 's Martin Dawes. "Sri Lanka may be third-world, but it is top-end third world.

"There would have to be a massive failure of government for people to starve on a large scale."

There is certainly a need for immediate, tiding-over relief of the kind we are seeing distributed. But the longer-term threat is far, far more important.

Owen says: "The tsunami destroyed people's livelihoods, their fishing boats, their guesthouses. They've got no capital and no insurance to replace them. They're not starving now, but they will be starving in two months if they've got no livelihoods and no incomes. That's what we've got to fund, the longer-term."

He adds: "People need to understand that the vast majority of that £60 million will not, and should not be, spent in the next two weeks."

The immediate aid effort may be attracting all the attention, but it is not the most serious problem.