Coastal battering persists with floods and malaria

SRI LANKA: Ampara on Sri Lanka's east coast took the full brunt of the tsunami and is suffering its second flooding in a month…

SRI LANKA: Ampara on Sri Lanka's east coast took the full brunt of the tsunami and is suffering its second flooding in a month.

Now, to add to people's miseries, malarial mosquitoes have multiplied and are biting.

Here the contrast with the vastly more accessible south is stark. While the clean-up is advancing in the south and there is a sense that the mood has shifted to bitter consciousness of reality, here the shock is palpable still.

Representatives from GOAL, the first international aid agency to arrive here, offered paid work to up to 100 men, but so deep is the trauma and a desperate need to retrieve something from the ruins, that so far there is no response. "I wish I was dead," said a man who had lost his entire family, as he shifted among the ruins of his home.

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The 10-hour back-breaking drive from Colombo on roads barely passable for a single vehicle (we came across two container aid lorries which had skidded off the road and another which had jack-knifed) is followed by half a mile of flood plain and finally a 500-metre width of indescribable devastation.

Out of a national death toll so far of 30,000, more than half are from this region. Some 2,000 of those are from a 15 km stretch of coastline. Imagine two or three blocks of New York city being wiped out in 10 minutes.

More than 16,000 homes have been destroyed and 180,000 people displaced in Ampara district, out of a population of 540,000.

According to the United Nations, many of these refugees simply ran away from their seaside homes, some of which may be intact. Families who have lived by and from the sea for countless generations are now petrified by it.

Again unlike the south, where many refugees have been incorporated into local homes, in the east the numbers are too great. Up to late last week, some areas were accessible only by helicopter.

More than 6,300 people, including 1,000 children and nearly 400 pregnant women, are in Ammankovil camp which up to a few days ago had no shelter, no sanitation and a single well with water of dubious quality.

What clothes the people possessed were used to protect their food rations - flown in by the air force - from the relentless rain. How long they will remain there no one knows. They have no idea where to go. Many will need resettlement.

While the aid agencies are moving into gear, the rain lashes the region and the monsoon season is due to continue for another month.

Ampara though is finally attracting serious international attention. The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, is due here on Friday and Bill Frist, Republican leader in the US Senate, is due in tomorrow.