One week on, and in the shattered town of Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, the people are awakening from mercifully numbed horror to something even worse.
The time for miracles is past; the missing will not be coming home. With it comes the dawning realisation of what is lost and what those losses mean for the future.
Pududu Weerathuna's father is among the missing. So is his tiny tuc-tuc, his three-wheeled taxi, adds Pududu's mother, almost incongruously to western ears. They have not only lost a dearly-loved husband and father, but also the means of making a living. For 20-year-old Pududu, the bright, eldest son who beat off intense competition to win a university place to study engineering, the only option now is to become the breadwinner. The broken dreams of the young and the helpless grief of the old hold little sway in a place where simple survival is paramount.
Out on the street, where local people are doing their best to meet immediate needs by bringing in supplies of rice and dhal for the hungry, tempers fray and fights erupt as supplies run low. Soldiers move in with sticks to control the surge forward.
International aid agencies, several of whom have announced their arrival in town with giant banners across requisitioned premises, have still to swing into action.
Within the walls of Vijayananda Mawadha temple, where Pududu and his mother and several hundred women queue patiently before being called forward by number for food, clothing and water, there is comparative peace. But it is the peace of a stricken people. Nearby, two young German doctors, here under the auspices of the British High Commission, sit exhausted in a four-wheel drive, chauffeured by a British ex-pat, Ivan Robinson. They started at dawn, and have already been to three camps in the hills.
"This is poverty and disaster," says their local guide, engineer Sunil Gurugamage. "When disaster hits against poverty, what more can you say? Relief is coming to those affected by the tsunami, but for the ordinary man there are problems which no-one has even begun to think about. Even if you have money, you can buy nothing because there are no shops. You cannot get money because there are no banks. You cannot go to your job because there is nowhere to work."
Robinson notes that all the food supplies so far have come from local organisations. But even these have been cruelly thwarted. Of seven food vans travelling south from Colombo in recent days, only three made it to Galle; the other four were hijacked. Two teams of Gurkha soldiers are due in from Nepal, with the task of escorting such convoys.
The young doctors with their bloodshot eyes listen wearily. People with asthma and diabetes need medication but where is it to come from when all the pharmacies have been obliterated?