Tsunami alert adds to young victims’ trauma

IT was the children Harsha felt most anguish for when the Indian Ocean quake struck on Easter Monday.

For three months his staff had worked to reassure the smallest victims of December’s tsunami that the odds of such a catastrophe ever happening again in their lifetime were infinitesimal.

“We are getting their minds settled. Then suddenly in the middle of the night the children are in a deep sleep and the mother comes in shouting and screaming ‘run to the temple, run to the mountains’ and you are in the darkness running for your life. Can you imagine the psychological effect of that?”