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Going back home to nothing
By Frances Bulathsinghala
Her bags are packed with all the essentials she thinks a displaced family should have and which can be carried by hand 350 miles from Colombo. She double checks the bags crammed with dhal, rice, packets of milk and daily essentials.

Her destination - Mullaitivu is no more a town. With most of the debris cleared it is a vast expanse of bare land. For the Colombo-residing Kamalini Selvarajan who has not been to her former hometown- which most of her relatives vacated 20 years ago with the beginning of the war-the aftermath of the December 26 tsunami horror is a bigger nightmare than the ethnic conflict.

"It took me three days to locate them," she says standing at the LTTE checkpoint in Pulliyankulam waiting for a bus to take her back. Many others who venture out to visit their friends and relatives living in this war cocooned land that now finds itself mangled by the sea, are not so lucky as Kamalini.

Sixty-year-old Ramajan who once owned some farm lands in the Mullaitivu region has spent two days in futile search of some cousins whose fate he never really knows and which only the mass graves in the region will reveal.

Temporary resettlement measures are being taken by the LTTE, which controls the region, following the reopening of the schools."Human skeletons are visible if you look closely," a dumbstruck visitor is heard to mutter as the region reels from the overwhelming number of bodies, covered by high mounds of sand.

In Nedunkerni a memorial is being planned over the mass graves where over tens of thousands of those who perished in the tsunami have been buried. "This is the only thing we can do to preserve their memory," says a young boy, shovel in hand who is seen clearing up for the proposed monument. It is hard to differentiate between LTTE cadres and young Tamil men who have volunteered for cleaning up operations. All these people have suffered, first from a needless war and secondly from an unexplained decree of nature.

In Mulliyawallai, four kilometres from the sea-wrecked Mullaitivu people who survived, but lost everything else have their own stories to tell. Forty-year-old Bavani who lost three generations of her family to the wrath of the sea is one of the 400 people in the Vidyananda College refugee camp in Mulliyawallai, one of the few small towns in the LTTE-controlled regions which was not battered by the furious waves.

"Forty people, my family lost forty people," repeats another old woman, her eyes getting a far away look. She talks to us but her statements seem to be addressed to the distant walls of infinity. She says with the same blank expression on her face that she escaped because she was visiting friends.

And as the youngest children play on oblivious to the thorny future that awaits them, the old look on, defenceless against a tomorrow that offers them little hope.

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