Photo courtesy of Lee Hsiang

Taipei, June 5 (CNA) A team from the Taiwan Root Medical Peace Corps has arrived in Sri Lanka to provide humanitarian assistance in the wake of serious flooding and landslides in the South Asian country, the group's head said Monday.

Liu Chi-chun (劉啟群) said the medical team arrived in Colombo, the largest city of Sri Lanka, at midnight Friday.

Torrential rains began to hit Sri Lanka late last month with the arrival of the monsoon season, triggering the worst flooding and landslides the country has seen in 14 years.

As of June 3, the flooding had left at least 224 people dead, 72 injured and 78 missing and had affected nearly 700,000 people.

Liu said medical care knows no borders, and he described the group's long-term goal as providing medical assistance to the world.

According to Lee Hsiang (李翔), one of team's doctors, the team traveled to a small mountainous city the morning after it arrived and set up a service station near a hospital in Ratnapura district, an area in southern Sri Lanka where serious flooding wreaked havoc and caused major casualties.

Liu said the group visits Sri Lanka regularly and also frequently provides assistance where natural disasters occur, including after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004.

(By Sunrise Huang and Lilian Wu)
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