Survivors of last December's tsunami that killed up to 232,000 people around the Indian Ocean are today remembing the disaster six months after one of history's worst natural calamities.
In the countries most affected - Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand - survivors complain that reconstruction of homes, the rebuilding of schools and the creation of work has barely begun.
Emergency relief is still being distributed, with the World Food Programme feeding nearly two million people in the region.
For victims, the memories of that fateful Sunday morning on Deccember 26th are vivid. In Aceh, where 168,000 people are dead or missing, bodies are still being found.
Parts of its coast look like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. In southern Thailand, where many foreigners were among the 5,395 people who died, small wreath-laying ceremonies were held this morning at a memorial on the tourist-island of Phuket. Four Irish people lost their lives in the disaster.
The body of Wexford man Michael Murphy (23), the last Irish person missing, was identified in Thailand in April as was the body of another Irish victim, Lucy Coyle (28), an accountant from Killiney, Co Dublin. The bodies of Eilis Finnegan (27) from Ballyfermot, Dublin, and Conor Keightley (31) from Cookstown, Co Tyrone, were identified in January.
The 9.15 magnitude earthquake that erupted off the coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island, the strongest in 40 years, sent walls of water as high as 10 metres barrelling into 13 Indian Ocean nations.
As many as 1,000 villages and towns were either damaged or wiped off the map. Little rebuilding has started and a massive clean-up is still going on.
International agency Oxfam said in a report yesterday that poor communities were vulnerable, partly because the tsunami affected some of the poorest in each of the three worst-hit countries.
Their fragile houses were washed away while the brick houses of richer people were more likely to withstand the force.
"Though the reconstruction effort in many cases is effectively helping poor people, in some cases there has been a tendency to focus on landowners, business people and the most high profile cases, rather than prioritise aid to poor communities," the report said.
Agencies