Mahendra Sudentha Wijesena used to spend every day in the water, but his attitude towards the sea has now changed for good.
"We are surfers and used to be always on the lookout for good waves," says the 28-year-old hotel manager. "But now when we see waves we run a mile."
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Wijesena's small hotel in Unawatuna lies directly on the coast. The restaurant was a well-loved meeting place for tourists from the region, as the beach was regarded as one of the most beautiful in the world, until disaster struck. Now the rooms are wrecked and there is nothing left of the restaurant.
Reconstruction has begun. Sri Lankans have not lost courage and they are working on making a new start.
In relation to its population of just 20 million, Sri Lanka was worst hit among the South Asian countries affected by the tsunami.
Estimates put the number of dead as high as 40,000, but the exact number will never be known.
Experts say reconstruction will take years. Along some stretches of the coast the waves swept up to 2km inland, destroying everything in their path -- people, homes, buses and ships.
Among the most devastating consequences was the destruction of a fully laden passenger train.
In the southwest of this holiday paradise, earthmovers are shifting the rubble, while trucks are delivering gravel and concrete.
The survivors are already starting to rebuild the walls of their homes and businesses.
This region that lived off tourist dollars is now a disaster area. The holidaymakers travelling along the roads have been replaced by aid convoys. The locals are grateful for the large assistance effort mounted by foreign organizations. But when the homes, hotels and diving schools have been rebuilt, the people here will need work and an income -- something the tourist market has provided in the past.
Sumith Shelton intends to complete the reconstruction of his diving school in Unawatuna within a month, but he has no idea how things will pan out after that.
"We can already write this season off," he says.
But he hopes that the first holidaymakers will be back in November, although no one as yet knows whether tourists will want to return to the beaches that bore the brunt of the disaster.
Alongside Shelton's diving school there are flood refugees living in temporary tents made of plastic sheeting.
In front of the tents a woman is cooking lunch for her family as Shelton's diving instructors clear away the rubble. For the moment they have work, but soon they will be unemployed.
"We are trying to help them," Shelton says, but he has few illusions that it will be easy.
"We will not be able to pay their wages for the whole year. We have to cut back ourselves," he says.
Muharam Perera also intends to have her small hotel back in running order within the month. The ground floor is a wreck, but the walls are still standing.
Perera has been lucky amid all the bad luck. None of her guests or staff lost their lives when the waves struck, taking them by surprise at breakfast.
"Perhaps the first guests will be foreigners from the various relief organizations," she says in hope, but she is also banking on the return of the tourists.
Perera does not even want to think of the future should the tourists fail to return.
"They'll be back, definitely," she says with a determined tone in her voice, but it sounds almost as though she is saying that to boost her own courage.
Next to the tourist sectors, the fisherfolk have been particularly badly hit. Many of their boats have been wrecked beyond repair, some of them lying well inland high up on the beaches among the coconut palms or even in the ruins of the houses along the coast.
Large holes gape in the bottom of the boats. The nets of the fishermen are lost, and their self-confidence has taken a heavy knock.
The sea that they thought they knew intimately has now brought death and destruction. They say that their former customers no longer want to eat fish because of the many bodies in the sea.
But they know no other trade than fishing, and despite their fears they will have to go out again to catch fish.
Nevertheless, there are signs of hope. The first fishermen from the badly wrecked city of Galle have already put to sea and cast their nets. And a group of foreigners in the region have pledged to buy the catch from them.
The survivors here have no choice but to return to the routine and restart their lives to get over the shock, but for many this will not allow them to come to terms with the horror they have lived through -- and in which so many of their loved ones died.
The entire nation has been traumatized by the tsunami, according to Health Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva. Many coastal residents have lost not only their homes and livelihoods, but also members of family and friends.
Their very lives lie in ruins. The first post-disaster suicides have been reported in Sri Lanka.
Sujeewa Amarasena, who heads the department of paediatrics at the hospital in Karapitiya near Galle, says: "We have to commence providing the survivors with psychological care immediately."
Along with psychiatrists and psychologists, Amarasena is arranging for training for young doctors and other medical staff so that they are in a position to provide emergency psychological counselling for the survivors.
More than 50 medical personnel have gathered for the courses -- many more than Amarasena had expected after making his appeal. The group is just the first of three that will undergo training.
The catastrophe has not led the Tamil rebels and the government to bury their differences, but the ordinary people of Sri Lanka are standing together, demonstrating an amazing solidarity.
The woman psychiatrist who is training the group tells of a girl that was believed dead. She was laid out alongside the corpses of the victims, lying there motionless until the mass funeral was to begin.
Then someone noticed that the child, who has not uttered a word since the disaster, was still alive.
In another case, a boy cannot put the image of a friend of his out of his mind. The friend reached out to him but was washed away, and the boy is plagued by his conscience. Since the tsunami he has been unable to eat.
Sri Lanka's young and the weak have suffered particularly. More than a third of the dead are thought to be children, and in the badly hit region around Galle, some 40 percent of the 130,000 driven from their homes are children.
Padiatricians are looking after hundreds of orphans who have lost both parents, while the authorities look for foster parents. The aim is that they should not end up in orphanages.
Eight-year-old Lakshita and his 10-year-old sister, Lassita, lost both their parents.
"They still haven't fully grasped what has happened," their grandmother H.K. Kulawati says.
She and her husband now aim to bring their grandchildren up.
"We would never give them up for adoption. We will look after them," the 55-year-old woman says, even though she does not know how they will manage.
The grandparents are in a state of desperation. Scarcely a house remains standing in their village of Daluwatumulla. The flood waves claimed the lives of a third of the population of 1,800, and the family is living in a camp set up in the Galle region.
Grandfather Medduwage Nandasena is a fisherman, but the boat that brought him his livelihood has been destroyed by the flood.
Nandasena is spending the time cleaning up his house as he is now unemployed in any case.
He holds up the coconut shell with a slit in it that the family had used to keep its savings in -- now empty after the remains of their possessions were looted in the aftermath of the disaster.
Nandasena has nevertheless found a couple of muddy coins and carefully wrapped them in newspaper. These 102 rupees -- equivalent to less than US$1 -- are the total savings the five-person family has for an emergency.
Like Nandasena, many other adults are assessing the damage and coming to terms with their new situation. Days after the disaster many are sitting in shock on the ruins of their former homes, gazing out to sea with an empty expression on their faces.
Many will never know for sure what really happened to their next-of-kin. Many of the bodies that were swept to sea will never be recovered.
In Karapitiya the corridors of the hospital echo to the cries of desperate people looking for loved ones lost in the disaster. A boy, perhaps 10 years old, breaks down completely as he looks for his brother. His parents are nowhere to be seen.
Screaming he hangs on to an elderly man passing in a wheelchair. Hospital staff and police officers try to settle the boy, talking gently to him, and the old man strokes his head.
Every attempt to prise the boy away from the wheelchair meets with failure, but finally a hospital orderly takes the child along with the wheelchair and its passenger down the corridor.
The bodies of the victims still lying under the ruins or in pools of water have begun to decay in the warm climate. If there is no jewelry or other unique identifying marks then they can no longer be identified by next-of-kin.
Most of the bodies are simply buried without identification. Extremely young soldiers and police officers are at the forefront of clearing up.
Some of the volunteers helping with the cleaning up and body recovery are little more than children. The hands of some of them tremble as they do their gruesome work, and their nights are plagued by the images of what they have seen during their shifts.
Juerg Spirk, a Swiss national who hires out beach huts near Unawatuna, compares the process to that of extended traditional mourning.
"At the beginning it's really bad, but then things start at some point to improve," he adds.
His huts are among the casualties of the waves, but he acknowledges his troubles are minor compared with those of many others.
Along the beautiful beach at Unawatuna no one is yet venturing into the water.
"Usually I take a swim every morning," Spirk says. "Yesterday, I told myself I would take my first swim today, but today I've postponed it again to tomorrow."
Spirk is a neighbor and friend of Wijesena the surfer, whose hotel was destroyed and who also has not yet ventured into the water to take up his passion again.
"Tomorrow we really will go swimming," Wijesena says.
Spirk looks out to sea and nods in agreement.
"Yes, let's do that," he says.
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