Five bodies were taken from a lake on the land side of the tiny fishing village of Nilwella yesterday.
In the horrendous scheme of things, this seems low - until you remember that this is five out of 14 families, in the words of Sarath Abayasueriya, a 32-year-old, whose computer and communications business in nearby Dilwella was swept out to sea.
Dilwella is in the district of Matara, where over 1,200 people died, 404 are missing and nearly 42,000 people have lost their homes. Some 30,000 are injured and 1,000 remain in hospital. Six hospitals and the central medical supply stores with all its contents are reported to be destroyed.
Fishing boats lie battered and useless, and the nets are gone. The library and the police station no longer stand. The children's playground looks almost sinister, buckled and stripped of its paint by the full force of the tsunami.
The prospect of further bodies washing back on to the beach is real. A 12-year-old girl hunches her shoulders and cries: "I will never go to the sea. I know the wave will come again . . ."
The rumour that another tsunami will attack between January 3rd and 8th has caught fire. Many of the fishermen believe it.
This is the scenario facing Goal workers in one of the regions they have focused on in Sri Lanka. The good news, says its country director, Mr Steve Langdon, is that the emergency response they expected to have to deal with has been handled swiftly and efficiently by the local authorities and the people themselves.
After a three-day bone-shaking reconnaissance mission around the east and south, Langdon has done his analysis and his men moved into place yesterday, some in the barely accessible eastern region which took the brunt of the tsunami, and others in the tourist-oriented south.
With food and medicine no longer priorities, Goal's aim now is to get people back to work. Within a few weeks, meagre savings will have been spent, donor fatigue will have set in, and the scene set for an even deeper crisis.
By mid-afternoon the team was already busy on the streets of blighted communities, chatting to locals, sensitively but clear-sightedly checking the reality, noting the greatest need.
Their analysis chimes with Langdon's. The short- and long-term answer lies in income-generation schemes, restoring little fishing fleets, mending boats, repairing the harbour, purchasing new nets. They sense a population already weary of being assessed by every passing NGO. Therefore the plan will be up and ready for implementation by tomorrow.
The need to rent several tuk-tuks (small three-wheel scooter taxis) and drivers to get the Goal workers around has transmogrified into a plan for the organisation to buy the taxis outright (cheaper than renting them over several months), employ drivers for several months, thereby giving them an income, and at the end, hand over the taxis to allow the drivers run their own businesses.