Tamil women face up to survival

By Frances Harrison BBC News, Vadamarachchi East, rebel-held northern Sri Lanka

Rasamani wonders why she is still alive

Sixty-eight-year-old Rasamani sits on what's left of her home and cries.

You can't call it a house - only the floor is left.

"I keep thinking why did I survive," she sobs. "There's no point in the elderly living - it's our children who should have survived".

When the giant wave came she was swept to the top of a tall palm tree.

Her two daughters and two grand-daughters died, but they found the body of only one grand-daughter.

Suffering

This is the first time Rasamani has been back to her village of Vathiragan since the tsunami on 26 December.

The whole area is devastated. It's not just her house - her neighbours suffered in just the same way.

"In many houses four, five, six people are dead. In some houses all are gone," she says.

Rasamani, who's a widow, survived a cyclone in the 1960s, 20 years of bombardment, bereavement and displacement in Sri Lanka's civil war, and now the tsunami.

I ask her why she thinks she has had so much suffering in her life.

"Who is going to answer that question?" she says and then repeats it.

Future lost

Yogam has also been to see what happened to her house.

We meet her walking several kilometres back to the refugee camp in the hot sun.

I thought with that machine I could manage a very good future for my daughter Viyadiyandani

She's managed to salvage a photograph of her son who was a Tamil Tiger fighter, but her house is completely gone.

"One son was killed in the war and the other was washed away along with his family in the wave," she says.

She, too, has no husband to help her eke out a living.

For her friend, Viyadiyandani, one of the most upsetting things, though, was the loss of her sewing machine.

The village of Vathiragan lies in ruins

"When my daughter was about four or five I worked really hard for three years doing manual labour and I saved a little money to buy a sewing machine," she recounts.

She worked as a tailor.

"I thought with that machine I could manage a very good future for my daughter so I was happy and returned to my own village to live."

Away with the sewing machine went her future.

Girls' education

In Pallai Central College which has been turned into a refugee camp for 7,000 people displaced by the tsunami, female Tamil Tiger rebels are collecting data on how this disaster has affected women.

A Tamil Tiger official checks documents in a relief camp

They're concerned about social problems in the camps where women and men are cooped up in overcrowded spaces.

And in particular they worry about how this will affect girls' education.

"Young girls who were in school and have lost everything are unsure whether to go back to school because their parents or head of family has been killed," explains one of the women rebels, Tamiloli.

She says these girls are at a critical point - having to decide whether to continue with their studies when there's no income to support the family.

The few aid agencies who were running income-generating projects for women in this war-torn part of Sri Lanka have seen two years of work destroyed.

But those women who were tough enough to survive the tsunami now need international help to pick up the pieces again.