The cruel sea of loss

By Andrew Harding BBC, Banda Aceh, Indonesia

The horrific aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami sees thousands of people in mourning and thousands of others still searching for their loved ones. Coping with such a tragedy is quite possibly beyond comprehension.

Survivors carry their belongings from damaged shops and houses

Where to begin? What can you say about a place where the corpses seem to outnumber the living?

I am writing this at a small table, in what used to be a cosy little restaurant, on a street which the wave almost spared.

The sun has just set, there will be noodles and bottled water again for dinner, and at some point an hour or two's sleep upstairs, between earth tremors and our cameraman's prodigious snores.

The owner of the restaurant is packing up today and hoping to leave. Kamala is a big, instinctively cheerful sort of lady who favours bright orange dresses and spangly brooches.

And she has been lucky by Aceh standards. Her parents survived and so did her 18-month old baby boy. Only a dozen or so close relatives were killed.

And her restaurant, with its garish arrangements of plastic flowers, is intact.

But I have watched Kamala's shoulders slump steadily over the past few days as what has happened starts to sink in. "It is all over", she keeps muttering, looking out at the street.

I can't make any sense of this... I can't find my friends Australian teenager

There are rats now by the front door, and a corpse, somewhere just behind the kitchen; but we cannot find it, and the smell snakes through the house.

Right now I am trying not to think about the dust that is in my hair and the sludge on my shoes, and the blackened baby's body that we drive past every day about a hundred yards up the street.

But in the face of such a vast panorama of horrors, the mind seems to zoom in relentlessly on details.

Absurd contrast

We flew in here on Wednesday from the wrecked beaches and holidays of Southern Thailand. We all knew people who had been spending Christmas around Phuket.

Some have survived, some have not.

There was, at times, something surreal about the chaos there. We had set up our equipment at an elegant hotel on a hill overlooking the bay.

The wave had not made it this far and so the pool was still full of laughing holidaymakers, the restaurant serving lobsters and cocktails to sunburnt Europeans in bikinis.

Survivors drifted in through the lobby, marked out by their grazed legs and dazed expressions.

A blonde Australian teenager with a bandaged foot stood and stared at the swimming pool. "I can't make any sense of this," he said, trying not to cry. "I can't find my friends. Is your phone working? I can't get mine to work."

'War zone'

I left Thailand on Tuesday night. It took us many hours to persuade immigration to let us into Indonesia's northern province of Aceh.

Some children have been evacuated to Medan, capital of North Sumatra

This region has been sealed off for the past 18 months as 40,000 government troops tried to crush a separatist rebellion.

From the air you can see the spine of volcanoes which stretches down the length of this giant island all the way to Krakatoa, a thousand miles to the south. The in-flight magazine boasted about Indonesia's seismic wonders.

Two men sitting next to me peered out of the window as we started our descent. The sea was full of little stick-like shapes; they could have been trees or bodies.

"Clean," said one man in broken English, "washed clean". He was pointing at the shoreline which did indeed look as if someone had taken a giant scrubbing brush to it.

Now, driving round the city of Banda Aceh, I have had this strange feeling that something is missing.

I figured it out this afternoon. I have been waiting to flinch at the sound of artillery. This place feels like a war zone.

In fact, it looks exactly like the Chechen capital, Grozny, after months of Russian shelling.

National duty

Mass graves are being used to help prevent an outbreak of disease

We have spent this afternoon with an 18-year old student called Abdullah.

He is thin and shy and exhausted, and he has the worst job imaginable. On Sunday, a few days after the wave came and wrecked his home, he volunteered to help clear up the bodies.

Since then he has been driving around in a white lorry with two other men, methodically collecting corpses - 50 at a time - and taking them to a giant pit on the outskirts of town.

He stopped for a break and eagerly accepted a cigarette, holding it between gloved fingers.

"This is my city," he said, matter-of-factly. "My heart told me to do this."

And despite the dust, and the stench, and the body-bags piling up in the back of the truck, he smiled.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 1 January, 2005 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.