Viji Village, September 25: It is now nine months since V. Thangumani, also know as Viji to her friends, lost her three daughters in the Tsunami. They were there then one moment, and washed away the next. She was only able to salvage three grainy photos of the girls, and lots of memories. It seems like yesterday.

Viji is one of 42 people in the village of Periyaneelavanai who lost family members to the Tsunami and are still totally traumatised. Their names have been handed to the Home for Human Rights by the village grama seveka (government agent). 83 villagers were lost in the Tsunami out of a population of around 1,000 – by far the largest death toll in any village we have visited.

If HHR does decide to help them it quite unlike anything the organization has undertaken to this point. The nearest equivalent is probably its program to rehabilitate torture, many of whom are also deeply disturbed.

It is somewhat strange that these 42 people have fallen through the cracks of the aid effort, because if there is one service offered in abundance by the agencies it is psychosocial support. According to Dr. Ganashan, the chief psychiatrist at Batticaloa hospital, no fewer than 65 agencies are offering psychosocial support in Batticaloa. Nine are working in a huge resettlement camp in Thiraimadu, where 1,000 new houses are being put up. Some of them are even squabbling over the same children.

Psychosocial support is a standard fare in emergencies and it usually manages to stir up controversy. There is no doubt that sudden disasters take a severe mental toll, but humans are also marvelously resilient and drugs are not always the answer. Dr. Ganashan says that outsiders make the mistake of confusing grief with depression. Unlike depression, grief is a natural state, not a medical condition. It can be managed but not treated.

The best way to manage grief, says Dr. Ganashan, is to help the survivor function within a society – and to help the society provide the right sort of support for the survivor. We’re about to find out how difficult this can be in a society has been injured by years of upheaval, culminating in the Tsunami.

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Viji is on the verge of tears when she comes to meet us in the house of the grama seveka with a friend, Y. Kousalya. It turns out that her friend (who is wearing a hideously inappropriate tee-shirt of the Titanic, donated by an NGO) lost five children. Unlike Viji, who is on edge, she seems stunned.

The tension must have built up as the two women prepared for this encounter, with people from the capital in the house of the village leader. Viji loses all composure at the first question, and sobs as she passes around the tattered photos. Her friend also carries photos of her dead children.

Their distress is so immediate that we’re all taken aback and quickly close our notebooks. Suddenly, we’re the ones who find it hard to communicate, and we sit for several seconds in an embarrassed silence. But the grama seveka, a gentle woman who clearly has the respect of the women, coaxes them and they gradually relax. Viji returns repeatedly to the fact that not one of her daughters has survived. Everything went with them – her support around the house, her old-age pension, her future extended family, her best friends, her in-laws, even her social standing.

She tells us that she would have committed suicide had it not been for her two surviving sons, and that she finds herself stopping women with daughters and asking if she can borrow them. Her husband has taken to drinking arrack, the local liquor.

The best way to manage grief is to help the survivor function within a society – and to help the society provide the right sort of support for the survivor. We find out how difficult this can be in a society has been injured by years of upheaval, culminating in the Tsunami.

The Tamil community has its own traditions to help people like Viji, who have suffered a grievous loss. The extended family rallies round, and the mourning goes on for a fixed time and involves the entire community. Mourners are expected to cry, but for their own departed relatives, not the bereaved family.

But this option is not available to Viji, who appears to live in an unfriendly environment. So many people in this community suffered loss that they are disinclined to favor one woman, who is not even a widow. The more distraught she gets, the more they mock her and call her crazy to her face.

It became so bad that the authorities moved her temporary shelter to a different plot of land, to be away from her neighbors. Not that they were even neighbors. No effort has been made to recreate neighborhoods in the temporary camps. For thousands, like Viji, the camp is merely the latest in a long series of upheavals and displacement.

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The grama seveka brings up another example of the unfriendliness of the place. Many of the families here, she says, were barely affected by the disaster but have loudly claimed compensation. Others, who really suffered, have been largely ignored. The Sri Lankan government is giving 5,000 rupees every month to a family with more than two members and 250,000 rupees to every family that lost a home. But no effort has been made to provide extra compensation to people like Viki or her friend Y. Kousalya, who have lost several children.

The grama seveka (who was herself detained some years ago for six months for talking to an LTTE patrol) has turned down several unreasonable requests for aid, and incurred the anger of her superiors. She handles it all with dignity and warmth, as if well aware that these women are far worse off than she is.

As the conversation gathers pace, it becomes clear that the two women most need someone to talk to, and some kindness. Once they start talking, they find it hard to stop and the bottled-up emotion comes pouring out. To my acute embarrassment, they kneel to kiss our feet. It should be the other way around.

Xavier and his team decide to select a group of volunteers who will receive some training from Dr. Ganashan and work in small sections of the village focusing on the 42 damaged survivors. Xavier will also draw on his international contacts to try and engage a group of Sri Lankan psychiatrists working in London.

We drive the two women back to the corrugated shacks where they are living, on the outskirts of the village. On the other side of the road are several mounds of sand. These are the graves of their children. They carry no headstone or any other sign of recognition.