GALLE, Sri Lanka — The grateful people of Sri Lanka would like to make a humble request to all those who have offered succor to its devastated tsunami victims: Please, no more ski jackets, moisturizing gel or Viagra.

The recent outpouring of tsunami support, while helpful on the whole, has brought with it a mountain of unusable stuff from the Western world. That includes cozy winter hats, Arctic-weather tents, cologne and thong underwear. Dubbed "frustrated cargo" by aid workers — because it often has nowhere to go — these misfit items are gathering dust in warehouses and creating major headaches for relief workers in the field.

Mounds of donated clothes litter the coastal highway south of Colombo. Bottled water from European mountain streams is flowing freely, raising concern about litter in the jungle. Medicines that are no longer needed, such as morphine, are feared to be loose in the country.

Some are putting items of no apparent local value to creative use. Impakt Aid, a group in Sri Lanka, cites two dozen goose-down jackets it recently received from a European relief agency. After some snickering, the group forwarded the coats to a refugee camp. There they were used to wrap babies who were without diapers.

"People are just bringing anything and everything," says Melanie Kanaka, a World Bank administrator who is helping coordinate aid in the battered town of Galle. "We don't have the resources in this country to sort it all out."

Paradoxically, many vital needs still aren't being met, even as pointless donations pile up. Government figures record the arrival of 30,000 sheets, but only 100 mattresses. Colombo's main airport says it received 5,000 pajama tops from Qantas Airlines, but no bottoms to go with them. The airline won't comment beyond saying that it sent a plane of supplies to Sri Lanka, primarily medical supplies. Many of the country's more than 300 refugee camps face critical shortages of cough syrup and infection-fighting creams — even though there are plenty of skimpy undergarments.

Making matters worse, many aid workers don't know where all the useless handouts are coming from, or for whom they are intended. Although most aid that arrives is earmarked for specific relief agencies, such as the Red Cross, some shipments are addressed simply to "The People of Sri Lanka" and have no return address.

In other cases, the aid arrives unsolicited on the doorsteps of local charities, courtesy of foreign relief providers they have never heard of. Or, it wanders into the country in the suitcases of well-meaning tourists who then strike out on their own for the tsunami zone.

Western clothes are a particular nuisance. Despite an average temperature of about 27 degrees Celsius and a preference for modest dress, aid groups are receiving sweaters and women's dress shoes. Worse, much of the clothes arrive used and in bad condition. That is a major problem, aid workers say, because some Sri Lankans fear used clothing has been taken from dead bodies.

As a result, discard piles are popping up everywhere — including the second-floor hallway of Galle's government district office. One day recently, as government officials processed aid requests, the moldy heap attracted just a handful of skeptical browsers.

One elderly woman pronounced the clothes "unsuitable" because they weren't appropriate for her age. The items included a wool baby hat, a mustard-colored dress shirt and a leopard-print dress.

At the Kattugoda Jummah mosque near Galle, meanwhile, children spent their free time last week doing back flips and somersaults over a knee-deep bed of hand-me-downs. The children tied a shawl around a rafter so they could swing around in the air before dropping onto the soiled laundry below. "Clothes are really good to play in," said 10-year-old Mohamad Afral as he jumped around on the pile.

Kattugoda Jummah's adults are eager to unload all the stuff cluttering up the mosque. As laborers carted off some of the garments in a wheelbarrow, one of the mosque's leaders, Mohamad Nizam, fished a crusty pillowcase from the pile and frowned. "This is useless," said Mr. Nizam, who says he is more concerned about the mosque's dwindling food supply.

Although essential in the early days of the relief effort, bottled water is now proving to be more trouble than it is worth because it is heavy and expensive to transport. Many villages have already restored their old water sources, or are using purification systems.

At the White Pearl Hotel in Hikkaduwa just north of Galle, Managing Director Ananda Lal Waduge said he isn't sure what to make of the 600 bottles of Voslauer brand mineral water that recently showed up in his lobby. The bottles were parked there by an Austrian relief team staying at the hotel.

The water "has a different kind of taste" than locals are accustomed to, Mr. Waduge said. "Normal people can't drink it, only foreigners."

On the hotel's beachfront patio, though, the Austrian relief workers said locals loved the stuff. Dressed in matching red-and-white team jerseys emblazoned with the words, "Austrian Water Support," the half-dozen volunteers were kicking back with some local lager and some cold Voslauer. After some discussion, they conceded that demand for bottled water was waning. "If we stay a month, maybe we will drink it," said Michael Gottwald, a 41-year-old volunteer with the group.

Unwanted medicines pose a more serious problem. Wary of potential epidemics, doctors and private citizens appear to have unloaded their sample bins and medicine cabinets and shipped whatever they could find. The shipments included useful antibiotics. But they also included drugs that aren't common in many villages and can easily be abused, such as Valium and antidepressants.

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