Art therapy helps children to cope with their ordeal
In the immensity of their grief, it is not survivors' bodily needs that clamour for help in Tamil Nadu, India, as much as their tortured souls.
Relief workers are grappling with the symptoms of trauma, particularly among children, in this east-coast region where 6,000 people lost their lives.
Children in relief camps wake up screaming from nightmares, shouting 'Papa save me'. Teenagers have started wetting their beds. Many children refuse to go near the sea. Others stare into space, listless and withdrawn.
Doctors and relief workers in the town say psychological help is as urgent as any other kind. The only 'therapy' available to some children came when volunteers from the SOS Children's Villages of India group opened two makeshift play centres last week and handed out balls, cricket bats, sheets of paper and felt-tipped pens.
Nearly all the 110 children, aged between five and 11, drew images of the tidal waves that engulfed their lives. The pictures show people floundering in the sea as the water submerges houses, trees and boats, while crows circle above and the sun shines.
Pongoldi, 10, drew a broad wall of water with people and boats tossed around on it as it approaches the shore - where an earlier wave has already wreaked devastation and sent people running to the rooftop for safety.
In another drawing, nine-year-old Kavita used only a blue felt-tipped pen to draw a great maelstrom of coconut trees, houses, people and fish. Kavita's mother died in the deluge.
'Some of them wept when they did their first drawing,' said J. Santhosh, a worker with SOS Children's Villages. 'Later, they became calmer. They need to express how they feel, and drawing is the only way they can do it. At first they wouldn't even talk about the disaster but now they're opening up.'
At a relief camp where Unicef has set up games and other activities, children were given modelling clay. Normally, children in fishing families make boats, crabs or shellfish. But that day, the children made strange forms.
'We couldn't figure out what they were,' said Sheema Sengupta, a Unicef counselling consultant. 'They told us they were broken dolls. They said that's how dead children looked as they lay on the beach.'
Ms Sengupta said that while 'normal' is hardly the right word to use - given that the children of Nagappattinam have lost their homes, loved ones and belongings - it is crucial to get them into a 'normal environment' quickly.
That's why the Tamil Nadu government has decided to bring forward the opening of schools; the hope is that, by doing so, children can experience some semblance of routine to help ease the shock of the past fortnight.
Fear of the sea is a powerful new emotion that psychological counsellors will have to deal with, among children and adults. 'The sea that used to give them a livelihood destroyed their families,' said Jitendra Nagpal, a psychiatrist based in New Delhi.
