"I am crying inside," a devastated beach-dweller tells Kathy Sheridan, in Moratuwa, Colombo.
Of the 127 families in Podujaya Viddyalaya College, a refugee camp for the fisher families of Moratuwa in the beachside suburbs of Colombo city, Sri Lanka, not one owned the plot of land on which they lived.
The little huts which sheltered up to three generations were built on government-owned railway land - illegally, of course. But what government was going to have the gumption to take on tens of thousands of poor families, evict them and then find itself faced with the cost of a massive resettlement?
Thus when the tsunami targeted Sri Lanka, it was the beach-dwellers, the poorest of the poor, who were the first and by far the most numerous targets of its savagery. These were people who owned nothing to begin with. They were not the kind of fishermen who could aspire to owning a boat.
These were the "still fishermen", whose pictures feature in the tourist brochures, the ones clinging on to the tall poles, with their fishing lines in the water. It was always going to keep them poor.
According to K. Hinatn Rodrigo, an intelligent, quietly spoken 38-year-old, some days they might earn 50 rupees (about 40 cent), on high days it might be a giddy 500 rupees (about €4) and "sometimes we earned not even one cent", he says.
"We hadn't enough to eat sometimes. We had no dreams for our children because we could not save a cent. But everyone who lived by the beach had the same lifestyle . . ."
They had a life, they had dignity, privacy, good neighbours, a tight community.
And that life seems like Nirvana compared to the purgatory in which they now find themselves. "We are alive; but we are like dead people."
The camp in the heart of Colombo houses about 500 people, including Rodrigo, his 30- year-old wife (the group leader), and their three small children. They arrived on December 28th when their houses were reduced to matchwood and what possessions they owned were washed away by the sea they thought they knew, but which "on that day rose up not like a wave, but like a dragon suddenly raising its head".
They escaped with their lives and they are proud and grateful for that. They get three meals a day and a mat to sleep on. But after two weeks in the camp, desperation is setting in.
Listening to some, there is a real sense of sanity slipping away.
"We need something to happen soon . . . I can't be here. This sharing is not good," says a man.
A woman on crutches limps over; born without a foot, she should have a wheelchair, says her sister. A frail 57-year-old comes to say that she has breast cancer, but cannot be treated because of her blood sugar. A 75-year-old blind man lies miserably on a mat in the corner of the stifling hall, which Rodrigo and his family must share with 60 others.
"There is no separate place for male and female," whispers an exhausted woman. In the middle of the bare stone floor, two small boys lie flat out, sleeping through the chaos.
There are no mattresses, no screens, no toothbrushes, no soap. The toilets are so inadequate that many go to the beach. The children here did not start back to school yesterday, like most of the children in the capital.
The army men who are running the camp skip the formalities on our arrival and in a friendly but firm fashion, reel off a wish list: mosquito nets, children's feeding cups, toys, schoolbooks, drawing paper and coloured chalk. Again and again, parents plead for the nets and the coils that smoke away the mosquitos. There is a peculiar irony here. While aid of every kind - school kits, hygiene kits, school-in-a-box kits, medical kits - is pouring into the remotest areas of Sri Lanka, it's as though the needy in places at the very heart of the capital have been abandoned.
Rodrigo gives thanks to the government for providing the food (lacking meat and protein though it may be), and the shelter, and the fact that "no sickness" has developed as yet. But he can't bear to think of the future. The reality is that they could still be in some kind of camp in six months and he will still know nothing else but fishing. And - like all the other fishermen here - he will still be terrified of the beach. They will never again live on the beach, they say, even if the government allowed it; in that dream world where someone might give them a choice, they would choose to live around 300 metres inland.
When Rodrigo dreams, he dreams that he owns his own boat. It's impossible; it would cost $2,500 and he wouldn't make it in a lifetime. But the dream is constant. And what happens when they all lie down to sleep at night, all 60 of them in that muggy, mosquito-infested hall? "When we are going to sleep, everyone starts to cry - especially the women, because they have nothing, nowhere to go, no personal life." And what about Rodrigo - does he never cry? He pauses, swallows hard, then taps his heart. "I am crying inside."