‘My husband said: Why are you alive and my sons dead?’
Her husband blames her for losing it, for not holding on hard enough to their two sons when the tsunami swept through their south Indian village.
“I thought that my two sons were my future. With them I could build this family,” the 22-year-old said, choking back tears at a refugee camp in the sprawling Hindu temple of Neela Dayachi Amman.
“What can I do? I am lost. My husband said, ‘Why are you alive and my sons are dead?’”
Three-quarters of her village’s children, virtually an entire generation, died in the December 26 tragedy. More than 500 were buried in a mass grave.
Children, too small and weak to run fast enough, to swim, or to hold on to safety, are the biggest victims of one of the world’s worst natural disasters. UNICEF estimates about 50,000 children died across the region - a third of the total death toll of 144,000.
Tens of thousands more were orphaned. Education, the only hope of a better life for many of Asia’s poorest children, has been badly hit, with schools and teachers wiped out and many child survivors struggling just to survive.
“Our children are now busy looking for food,” says Effendi, a 37-year-old father in Indonesia. “I don’t know when the schools are going to open.”
The US-based Christian Children’s Fund (CCF) has sent counsellors to Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka to treat traumatised children.
“The psycho-social needs will be great as mass burials continue to take place,” said Daniel Wordsworth, director of the fund’s international programmes. “(CCF) will provide a safe space where children can play and participate in normalising activities with other children to express their fears, loss of family and friends, and the trauma.”
