Ten-year-old Pradeep stares at a coloured illustration depicting a terrified man being tossed about by a huge, sapphire blue wave. He shuts the book and says nothing.
But his eyes betray the pain he cannot put into words. The double-page picture illustrates a mythical tale and is part of an elementary-school textbook that he has just been given by an official in Periyar Kallapet village in Pondicherry, the former French enclave on the Bay of Bengal. But Pradeep knows only too well the terror the sea holds.
When the giant wave hit his fishing village, he was playing near a temple with his two brothers, and all three managed to run to safety. His widowed mother was, luckily, away from the area, selling fish in the market.
But the boys’ grandmother and 12-year-old sister Vasanthi were not so fortunate. Both of them were killed when the tsunami arrived, pulverising the family’s seaside home.
”They were watching TV with the sound very high, so they did not hear the warning shouts from other villagers,” explains Pradeep.
He now lives in a relief camp with his mother and brothers, with little certainty about when or whether the new house promised by the government will be built — and by whom. But he still clings to his dream for the future. One day, somehow, he hopes he can still go to college, get a degree and become a government officer, like the one who presented him with the schoolbook.
”Even earlier, I never wanted to be a fisherman,” he says. ”It is too risky.”
Pradeep’s is a story that is being repeated across the Indian Ocean’s wrecked communities.
In relief camps from Indonesia to Sri Lanka, aid workers are confronting a new and terrible reality: that the children of the tsunami are a psychologically blighted generation.
Studies of previous disasters have shown that, of people who are still unable to function properly a year after a disaster, 30% of them will remain ”dysfunctional” for the rest of their lives, while an even larger number will carry lifelong scars.
In Indonesia alone, about 35 000 children — largely in Aceh province — have lost one of two of their parents. As if that were not traumatic enough, it is the way in which their parents, friends and other relatives died: swept out to sea in front of them as they clung on, that already has been responsible for deep mental damage.
In Akbar, a fishing village on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast, amid the wreckage of an empty school, an 11-year-old boy, Jaheer Najoor, wanders through his former classroom searching for friends who will never return.
Out of the 30 pupils in his class, he is the only survivor. Gone too is the boy’s speech.
”Jaheer has not spoken since the tsunami came,” says Ahmed Mohiddin, principal of the school. ”We had 600 students. Now I cannot count half of that number alive.”
Jaheer lost his mother in the tragedy, and his father cannot cope with the loss. So he now lives with an aunt far from the shore.
”He is too afraid to return to the beach. How can a child understand what has happened?” says Mohiddin.
Dressed in a blue shirt and shorts, the child stares at flattened coconut palms and the smashed walls that once lined his former school. When asked what happened here, he turns away and cries.
In the wrecked communities of Aceh, where Save the Children has been working for 30 years, staff have been shocked by what the tsunami has done to children’s minds as well as their bodies.
”There is this whole aspect of how we help these children cope with their feelings of grief at losing their families, friends and sometimes even whole communities that we are just beginning to deal with after the tsunami,” says Eileen Burke, working with Save the Children in Banda Aceh.
”Among the littlest children we have seen this fear that the earthquake and waves are going to come back at any moment. Some of the children have been so traumatised by what they have been through that they are unable to speak. They are not able to express their grief.”
Aid workers in Banda Aceh are coping with numerous cases of children who saw their parents disappear as they clung on to window frames and trees. One child from a seaside family was swept three kilometres inland as his entire community was killed.
The response of Save the Children has been to set up safe areas in relief camps where children can be as normal as possible — playing sport, painting and simply being children.
As part of the return to normality, Indonesia’s ministry of education has ordered that all children in the worst-affected areas return to some kind of schooling by January 26 at the latest.
”In any given population you have 3% to 4% who are at risk of developing mental health problems,’ says Christine Knudesen, senior protection officer for Save the Children.
”In a crisis of this magnitude, it is hard to say what the outcome might be but it could be 10%, 20%, even 30% who develop some sort of long-term problems.
”What is unique here is the scale of the event. I usually deal with children in conflict situations where the problems are generally chronic but go up and down. Children can deal with the death of a parent. But what is so different here is the sheer magnitude — trying to help children understand why grandma, auntie, four cousins have all died in a single incident.
”It is far too early, however, to start talking about post-traumatic stress. We are not even at the stage of screening for children who might have deeper problems and will need intervention.
”A lot of what people are feeling — both the children and the adults looking after them — is normal in an event like this: sleeplessness, nightmares and anxiety. What we need to do is get normal routines going again and then see who needs more help.”
But if the psychological impact is one that threatens whole communities, it is not the only issue confronting the children of the tsunami.
Disease, malnutrition and dehydration are still a problem. And children, along with the elderly, are the most vulnerable to dying from diseases that in other circumstances would be survivable, including measles and diarrhoea.
The greatest concern of all is reserved for the orphans of the wave — the thousands who have lost all contact with their families.
At Kalmunai Base hospital in Ampara in Sri Lanka last week an infant dubbed ”Baby 81” was kicking playfully at a pink blanket as nine desperate, heartbroken women quarrelled over him, all claiming he was theirs — torn from them by last month’s tsunami.
The United Nations Children’s Fund says preliminary data indicate that nearly 1 000 children were orphaned by the tsunami in Sri Lanka alone, and another 3 200 lost one parent.
One man standing outside the nursery at Kalmunai Base hospital last week threatened to kill himself and his wife if they were not given the baby. A woman at the hospital said she would kill the doctors if he is not returned to her.
The infant, bruised and covered in mud but otherwise healthy, was brought to the hospital hours after the tsunami struck Kalmunai, a remote town in eastern Sri Lanka populated by Muslims and Tamils. It was partly cut off after a major bridge was swept away by the waves.
He was given the label because his real name is not known and he was the 81st admission that terrible day, officials said.
Now, nurses in the hospital are competing to take care of the infant, according to doctors. They have put a mottu on his forehead — a black stain to ward off evil. And the nurses are not the only ones vying for him.
”Parents who have lost their children come every day to the hospital to check,” says Dr K Saseenthirian. ”Some go back, and some stay and claim that the baby is theirs.”
”Most of the parents who came and claimed that this is their baby are really believing that this is their baby,” Dr K Muhunthan, a consultant obstetrician, told Sky TV last week. ”Maybe they are not lying, because they have lost a baby of the same age and all the babies they look at look like their own child.”
And while stories have emerged of children being taken, the threat facing those separated from their families is that, for some, no relatives will ever be found.
”Save the Children has enormous expertise in reuniting families during and following conflict and displacement,” says Save the Children’s John Reinstein. ”But the scale of family tracing required is unprecedented. It is critical that we get children and families missing children registered as soon as possible.”
And some of the orphans are very young. The youngest child registered by Save the Children so far in Indonesia is two years old. Neighbours are now caring for the little boy despite having lost their own home, and they have been able to provide some information about his family, where they are from and their professions.
Tragic though his circumstances are, there is at least the hope that this particular little orphan will be too young to remember the events of that terrible day.
But for thousands more orphans the future looks bleaker. These children of the tsunami have lost their parents, their homes and many of their relatives. What the long-term effects on their mental health will be, no one precisely knows. — Guardian Unlimited Â