A clock rests among debris in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, on Thursday. (Reuters)

New York, Dec. 30: When Craig D. Williams, an architect in Santa Rosa, California, first heard about the devastating impact of the tsunami on communities in Asia and East Africa, he jumped online. As the director of the North American chapter of Architects Without Borders, an international network of volunteers, he was able to reach colleagues in 15 nations.

?We are facing a tragedy of historic proportions,? he wrote in an e-mail, urging them to start thinking about what the organisation could do.

About 50 wrote back, joining a global effort that is just beginning to take shape. Over the next few months groups like this could send volunteers and housing experts to areas where there are vast numbers of survivors without homes.

As relief agencies and governments mobilise to provide temporary shelter, food, fresh water, medical care and sanitation facilities, a handful of non-profit organisations with money from governments, UN agencies and private individuals are gearing up for longer-term rebuilding and reconstruction projects.

Harry van Burik, the international programme director of Shelter for Life, a non-profit relief and development organisation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, said his group hoped to spend $1.5 million to build 1,000 houses in Sri Lanka, where about 200,000 homes were destroyed and more than one million people are believed homeless.

?Sri Lankans are living in cramped conditions in schools and churches and desperately want to go back to their homes,? Van Burik said. ?But they won?t find anything there.?

His organisation built 5,000 shelters in Afghanistan after the 2002 quake. And rather than fly or ship prefabricated shelters to Sri Lanka, where it has been building homes for people displaced by civil war, it plans to construct one- and two-room brick or cement houses with pitched roofs.

The philosophy guiding many groups involved in housing relief is that homes are the foundation for restoring a destroyed community. ?We focus on individuals and villages,? said Williams, whose organisation has provided design and technical assistance in Afghanistan, Vietnam and Bosnia. ?We don?t help rich hotel owners with beachfront property.?

Farshad Rastegar, executive director of Relief International, a non-profit group in Los Angeles, said secure, permanent shelter is a first step in helping people rebuild their lives.

To help 60,000 homeless victims of an earthquake last year in Bam, Iran, Relief International is completing 870 homes with quake-resistant concrete foundations and metal beams. The houses, adobe style but with a steel subframe, cost $2,400 each and in many cases replaced simple mud houses that had ?tumbled like a ton of bricks,? he said.

Housing advocates measure success in small numbers. Cameron Sinclair, the founder and executive director of Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organisation with members in over 100 countries, said he hoped to raise $15,000 for victims of the tsunami, enough to build about a dozen houses, and has so far gathered $7,000.

For the moment, however, many relief organisations are concentrating on providing temporary shelter. Often it consists of a simple blue tarp: cheap, easy to distribute, easy to put up.

Sinclair has been working with Global Village Shelters, a design company in Morris, Connecticut, that has created a $370 flat-pack housing unit. A few prototypes are in Afghanistan and 100 recently arrived in hurricane-trammelled Grenada.

The company is in touch with groups like the International Red Cross, which could buy and ship the kits, said president Daniel Ferrara, adding that about 500 of them could be available for tsunami-hit areas within a month.