South Sri Lanka moves on from tsunami, war curses north

By Simon Gardner

PERALIYA (Reuters) - Sri Lankan housewife D.W. Leelawathi can still picture the 2004 tsunami as if it were yesterday, but three years on she and thousands like her are finally back in homes they can call their own and are moving on.

Standing among piles of sand, earth and rock in her front garden, the smell of fresh-cut wood still permeating the air as her new home nears completion, Leelawathi, 69, gestures to a nearby rail track, torn up as the tsunami swept away a passing train killing 1,270 people on board.

"The tsunami is not only in my dreams. Even in the daytime I feel as if it happened just yesterday, with so many bodies kept here," she said, pointing at a plot of grass next to her home. Two of her children were among the dead.

"But now our house is rebuilt," she said, standing in front of a 3-storey, 8-bedroom home her policeman son is building for her, partly funded by a 250,000-rupee ($2,300) grant.

The United Nations says nearly 100,000 families are now back in permanent shelter on the third anniversary of the worst natural disaster in memory, which left 35,000 people dead or missing in Sri Lanka and killed around 230,000 in total around the Indian Ocean rim.

But ever-deepening civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil Tigers has hamstrung rebuilding work in the east and halted it in parts of the rebel-held north, where materials such as cement and steel rods have dried up because of a government ban.

Thousands of families in the war-ravaged north and east are still living in basic, temporary shelters with palm-frond roofs and corrugated metal sheet sides, their numbers swollen by others displaced by the war.