A SWINDON couple who survived the Asian tsunami have told how they returned to the scene of the disaster to give out supplies to locals.

Debbie Donkin, 44, and Pip Reeves, 47, of Old Town thought they were going to die when the giant waves hit their hotel in Wadduwa, Sri Lanka.

But the fear they went through that day did not stop them taking food and drink back to the area to help the people they had met.

Debbie, a chef with Swindon catering company Aramark, said: "I have never been so frightened as I was that day. I was absolutely hysterical. We were in the water and we thought we were going to die, we really did.

"But the people we knew there were so good to us that we wanted to go back and help in some way."

Two friends they had made, Siri and Subash, looked after them and drove them to another hotel in Sigiriya, five hours inland.

Pip, a service planner at Swindon-based cleaning product firm Ecolab, said: "The people had shown us such kindness, we just wanted to help. The two men did so much for us we needed to give something back."

On their way back the couple, who have two children, Alex, 21, and Naomi, 19, went to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to get 20 boxes of food and bottles of water to give to people in Wadduwa.

Pip said: "We took 20 boxes but even if we had taken 1,000 it wouldn't have been enough. The people there have nothing now. The country is devastated."

Debbie described the experience of handing out the supplies to the starving children.

She said: "We had 70 people around us trying to get stuff and women were pushing their children forward. It was heart-breaking."

The couple, who saved all year and paid £3,000 for the dream holiday, managed to get a flight back to England three days after the tsunami on December 29.

On their return they were proud to see how generously people in this country have reacted.