Let me share with you some of our experiences in the villages badly
hit by Tsunami waves on the west coast of India.

The situation in these villages is very bad and the atmosphere is very
gloomy. As we saw in the east coast, many people are still under shock and
fear. It is so visible on their faces. In these fishermen villages, people
lived hardly ten or twelve metres away from the sea in huts and semi-permanent houses. But after Tsunami these areas are mostly plane. In six villages, where altogether eight hundred people were killed, many died because the waves swept them and put them in a canal which is about two hundred meters away from the sea coast. This canal is about ten meters wide and ten metres deep and so many got stuck in the mud and other wastes of these villages. Even yesterday they found two dead bodies from this canal. It is a nightmare to see mutilated dead bodies everyday. A woman who managed to hold on to a tree survived the waves told us that the most terrible thing for her was to see her beloved ones being drowned after being smashed against house structures and trees. Though some cleaning works are done, still the areas look dirty and unhealthy with foul smell in the air. here too large graves were prepared and dead bodies were put in large numbers. There was a cemetery of a church in one village and it was destroyed, leaving skeletons and bones spread around in the area. One man who helped us to meet the worst affected families, told us that he could not go to the next village after the waves as he did not like to tread on the dead bodies. It must have been a terrible scene.
I should say the situation in these villages is not as terrible as the
one on the East coast. May be the difference is that there the villages lost
thousands while here only a few hundreds from each village. Altogether only
about two thousand died here. Here too there are many children who are
orphaned and will need special care to bring them up to be normal human beings. Many women are in terrible shocks like the children and I fear that many would become mental patients if emergency medical care is no given. As I wrote in one of my earlier mails, there are requests from various groups/organizations in the area for help and we shall decide on this shortly. So far we have only given emergency aid for food, clothes, school articles etc but soon we will have to engage ourselves in activities like organizing medical camps,counselling sessions etc through local organizations.
Meantime the villages near Samhathi's main centre and regional centres
are facing a bad and unexpected situation. Tsunami waves also caused famine conditions in most of the villages as fishermen could not go for fishing for weeks now. Also a serious problem the fishermen face is that even some of them who caught fish could not get buyers as people are very much scared to eat fish now, thinking that these fishes had eaten dead bodies. Unfortunately fishermen also found lot of dead bodies moving around in the sea ( about two or three kilometres from our shore) and this scared them more. In fact all these days dead bodies are still coming to our shore. Past few days eleven bodies came to the village where Samhathi's office is situated. It is a terrible situation to see dead bodies everyday on the shore. We prevent the children from seeing such mutilated bodies, but they are aware of the situation. Before I conclude let me thank you and all those helping you for the valuable aid you collected and support you are giving us to face this worst situation.

May God bless and reward each of you

With love..........Direktor Fr A.Jacob Paliath