In 2004, Nick Batter and Cory Hoover took their diplomas from Napa’s New Technology High School and headed for college. It might have been a typical year of freshman fun, until the devastating December tsunami struck South Asia.

Reports of widespread destruction on the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka moved Batter, Hoover and Gereon Yee — all friends from Sonoma High School — to action. Three years later, the 21-year-olds are planning their fourth aid trip to the teardrop-shaped island nation, where they’ve dodged artillery shells and rocket fire in a bitter civil war.

“You could hear the rockets flying over our heads,” said Hoover, a film student at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico who is working on a documentary about Sri Lanka. “That happened in multiple places.”

“We’ve been places the United Nations haven’t,” said Batter, a rising senior studying history and government at Harvard University.

Starting their nonprofit, now called Sri Lankan Aid, “was pretty bumbling at the beginning,” Batter said. The three young men hit up friends and family for donations, made contact with a Sri Lankan volunteer coordinator, and set off in the summer of 2005.

What they found was unexpected. The tsunami had only added to the misery of Sri Lankans suffering a decades-long civil war; but where aid agencies rushed to assist coastal victims of the natural disaster, interior villages continued to languish in brutal poverty amid violent conflicts between rebel and government forces.

“We realized that all the (coastal) villages we looked up were already being taken care of” by other nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, said Yee, a chemistry student at Santa Rosa Junior College.

But nobody was helping the villagers in Alumkulum. Too small to appear on most maps, the northeastern settlement is home to about 600 poverty-stricken families displaced from their ancestral lands by the war.

“The people in this region don’t get much support from the government,” Yee said, and “they weren’t considered part of the natural disaster.” Yet Alumkulum was badly in need of assistance: Its people, no longer able to hunt and gather their food, were slipping deeper into poverty as the war flared around them.

Most aid agencies have steered clear of the region because of the civil conflict between Tamil rebels and the Sinhalese government. Control of Alumkulum has changed repeatedly over the years, and sometimes the fighting is so severe that Batter, Hoover and Yee have been unable to travel there.

But on their first trip, in 2005, the three friends were able to make a difference in the village. They began by talking with some of the families about what needed fixing first.

“Their school was badly damaged from the war,” Yee said, with animals soiling the classrooms and a UNICEF tarp for a roof. With help from hired local laborers, the North Bay students rebuilt the school and fenced out the wildlife, replaced school furniture and installed chalkboards.

“We actually had a pretty good impact,” said Batter. The civil war prevented them from returning to Alumkulum last summer, so Sri Lankan Aid shifted its efforts to Galle village, building a new wing for the orphanage there.

‘We really saw war’

Then the Alumkulum school was hit by shelling, prompting an emergency trip by Batter and Hoover in January.

“We really saw war,” Batter said. “We’ve met with rebels, we’ve met with breakaway paramilitary groups,” in the effort to continue their aid work.

Since then, Yee said, the conflict has shifted to the northwest, encouraging the group to plan extensive projects in Alumkulum this summer. Nearly a dozen volunteers will install a well and a pump, build teachers’ quarters, rebuild classrooms and start a community garden, among other work.

Sri Lankan Aid focuses chiefly on schools, Yee said, both to provide the community with a gathering place and to educate its upcoming generation.

“They are the people who are going to be making the changes in the future,” he said.

A federally recognized nonprofit, Sri Lankan Aid is in the process of obtaining tax-exempt status. Grants and donations pay for the work, but Yee, Batter and Hoover emphasize that none of the money goes to their own travel and expenses.

“One hundred percent of our donations go directly toward the projects,” Yee said. “We’re providing completely for ourselves.”

The three friends are hosting an informational event for Sri Lankan Aid at a private home in Sonoma, today, 6:30-8:30 p.m. To R.S.V.P., contact Yee at 326-0394 or Yannick Albright-Phillips at 933-0312. The group also has a mailing address for donations and correspondence: P.O. Box 1392, Sonoma CA 95476.