And so towards the evening, we arrived at Hambantota town, to our immense relief there was no stench of death and decay for the clearing of dead bodies had already been done efficiently, but there was this eerie empty wasteland where once there had been a seaside town, and there was this market-place where thousands of people had gathered for their weekend's shopping which was now just nothing.....

I had watched the news hour after hour, day after day , on TV. Yet the extensive coverage on BBC and CNN still had that 29-inch screensize dimension to the scenes. The reality is something else altogether.

Some days after arrival in Hambantota, I had the opportunity to briefly walk about at Ground Zero, so to speak. The beautiful ocean on one side, a fresh sea breeze, bright sunshine, it was just so and even more beautiful and yet as far as the eye could see the ground below was wasteland and I could feel the hopelessness and helplessness of anyone who had been there when that huge wave taller than a house came roaring. . In the time it took you to read just this paragraph, 14,000 people in Hambantota  were dead.

Here and there, a few tents housing a few people. Most of the survivors were probably staying with their relatives elsewhere, but for those venturing back to the coast, there was nothing where they once lived.

This is a catastrophe on a gigantic scale. Even in this small coastal town, thousands of families suffered loss of life, property and financial ruin.

To even begin to try to recover is a monumental task. All those thousands of bodies and body-parts of humans and animals to be recovered and buried/cremated with appropriate religious rites where possible, and for countless others just the word "missing" to describe their absence.

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