The earth continues to yield up its dead in the flattened shell of Hanbantota. Sixty bodies were found in the salt lagoons on Sunday night. Already, 5,000 are confirmed dead here, many of them women who had come in from 50 kilometres away on market day.
While at first glance the problems of Sri Lanka seem to be concentrated on the coastline, no one can put a figure on the final toll, still less the burgeoning psychological and social problems which will come when international attention has moved on and the vulnerable elderly and orphaned children are left with the brutal new reality.
In Diwella, Ihalawela Wimacaratwe, whose 30-year-old studio photography business was swallowed by the tsunami, leaving six people out of work, tries to smile for the visitors. But the man is clearly having difficulty keeping his composure. His small daughter says that her aunt rings constantly from Australia, begging them to leave and come to live with her. As Ihalawela stands helplessly at the door of his dank-smelling shop, clutching the only surviving piece of his business - a promotional mouse mat, the only one to survive the waves out of several thousands he had printed up - he admits that he is considering the offer. "There is nothing here", he muses.
A mother of four stands desolate outside her beachside home. The solid little bungalow looks as if it has been sawn roughly in half. She has moved into her brother's tiny house. He also has four children. It's a tight squeeze and cannot go on. But she will never live close to the sea again, even if the authorities were to allow it.
As they speak, a local man is supervising the winching of a boat out of the side of a house. Lorries are depositing plastic tanks of fresh water along the roadsides.
Roads which were completely blocked with silt, palm trees and detritus of all sorts are being slowly cleared. As Brian Fagan, a Goal worker, put it: "I'm seriously impressed with this. Just a week after the disaster, the roads are almost clear, they're repairing the water supply and the electricity is connected. They have cranes here lifting obstacles off the streets."
The response of the authorities has been generally commended. But an important element of this story is how the Sri Lankan people themselves have flocked to the help of their stricken brethren. Clearance work is being carried out by local authorities, but helped in great part by volunteers and by local businesses donating trucks and JCBs. And while displaced families can be seen trekking to the temples and schools to collect provisions, almost all have found lodging with relatives or other local people, meaning that refugee camps of a kind which have become identified with a crisis like this hardly exist.
Across the country, ordinary people have gathered in temples, arranged the buying of food and then the transportation of it on treacherous roads. A native of Matara, Laksaman de Silva has given up his December salary cheque and put it with the last few thousand rupees of an elderly neighbour, along with whatever he could gather along the way, and together they assembled bags containing milk powder, a kilo of red rice (more nutritious, he says), two kinds of soap for skin and hair, toothpaste, paracetamol, tinned fish and tea. Truck after truck with local aid organisation signs can be seen heading for affected areas.
The upshot is that by far the greatest quantity of aid distributed so far has come from Sri Lanka itself. But the priority now is to sustain that and carry it through to the inevitable time when unaffected individuals will begin to prioritise their own families again and pull back. This is the challenge now for all the aid organisations. A surfeit of food and adequate medical aid mean that charities must reassess their strategies. A way must be found to regenerate tourism, coax frightened fishing communities back to the sea, even help to resettle people who may no longer want to live on the shorelines, as they have done for generations.
Goal workers say confidently that the face of the problem can be altered in a few months; the UN says it could take 10 years to rebuild the region. Looking now at town after town, which resemble bombed-out villages from the second World War, it is hard to accept Goal's vision. But there is an indisputable sense of can-do on both sides and a great availability of skilled, educated labour. If the international community stays with the effort for a decent period, who knows what miracles might be wrought?