INDONESIA: The smell is unmistakable. Mohamed Assim Jameel is standing on the remnants of his house on the beach. His grief and despair are evident in his exhausted body and his bloodshot eyes. His legs and arms are heavily bandaged but that hasn't stopped him returning repeatedly to sift and sit among the rubble.
He believes that his wife and two little boys, one aged six, the other eight months, are under the smashed masonry. The smell today confirms it. He last saw them on December 26th after he spotted sea-water "bubbling from the bottom of the sea".
He grabbed one of his children and started to run. His wife - five months pregnant - was behind running with their two other children. "I looked back and they were there. But I never saw them again," he says, his eyes filling up as he gestures towards the ruin beneath him. "All I have left is this sarong and a shirt loaned to me by a neighbour."
A composed little gathering of five or six stand around him. There is no hysteria or demands that something must be done. There is too much despair.
For the 1,300 families of this densely populated 1½-km long beachfront of Sainthamaruthu, already with 2,500 confirmed dead and another 500 bodies awaiting discovery in one tiny area, this has become routine.
Thirty minutes before, a group cleaning the stinking debris from a house found the body of a child. They believe it was a child, a boy of around seven or so, from the size.
But his grotesquely decomposing body allowed for no formalities or final goodbyes. He was immediately wrapped in a sheet, taken to the burial ground less than 100 yards away on the beach, where a five-foot hole was dug in the sand and within half an hour, the anonymous little body was buried. Other small mounds in the sand signify a similar fate for many others buried without ceremony. "Many fathers are looking for their children," shrugs a weary local man, "one of them thinks it is his son. But how can we know?" In this small patch of hell, intolerable smells permeate through the bricks and masonry. The detritus of everyday family life lies scattered around - a tiny shoe, a beautiful blue sari, a schoolbook lying open on a rock, a damp, torn Koran.
Behind the mosque, a gentle, courteous member of its board of trustees, shakes the strangers' hands and thanks them for coming. He is sitting among what looks like numerous piles of sandy clay.
They turn out to be mass graves, each containing about 50 bodies , some 400 in all, hurriedly buried. He still looks bemused when he remembers December 26th. "I saw all the people running, and shouting 'the sea is coming, the sea is coming'. I thought, how could the sea be coming? And then I saw it too." A few yards away, less than 100 metres from the magnificent shoreline, a smashed hulk of a building is recognisable as a hospital by the ambulance lying crushed and battered against a collapsed water tower. The building was a sitting target for the brunt of the waves.
The children's ward, with its barred windows, held 42 children that day. Only four survived. The room where the water crashed in and reached well above the windows is now a ghostly place of twisted bedsteads, a child's potty, a single small high-heeled sandal, IV needles and saline drops.
There are no cellophaned bunches of flowers, no grieving relatives to make a shrine of this place of loss. The silence is profound, with only the rhythmic sound of the ocean - "now sleeping like a baby", in the words of a local - to serve as a requiem.
The school alongside is almost destroyed. The one piece of luck these people had is that disaster visited on a Sunday.
The other piece of good cheer relates to a man who identifies himself as S.M.A. Madeed. He was taken to the mosque as a dead body but suddenly rose up and walked. When he got back to his substantial house on the beach with its adjoining grocery shop, however, he found he had lost his 22-year-old daughter and two grandchildren.
His shop, worth 300,000 rupees (about $30,000), has simply disappeared. Both his sons are fishermen whose livelihoods have been destroyed.
Men who suddenly look old stand bewildered among the wreckage of their homes and trawlers.
Boats, driven by the ferocity of 30-foot waves, are stuck in houses more than half a km from the beach. Three hundred of them were scattered like matchsticks across the village. Nets lie tangled and useless near the bridge that crossed the little harbour to continue the Beach Road. The bridge was swatted out of existence. The road is gone.
The pretty little harbour has been seriously damaged. The view is that the first task of any agency is to re-energise the fishermen.
But while undiscovered, decaying bodies lie so close and the streets remained filled with the debris and muck being cleared from the houses, it is difficult to see how they can move on.
GOAL workers, who see this as a priority, yesterday hired two JCBs and 12 tractors to start the clearing process on the Hospital Road.
With a sense that something was needed to kick-start a new phase for the village, Paul Jowar hit on the idea of getting the president of the mosque to formally launch the project.
He floated the idea as a joke initially, but yesterday the mosque president duly turned up at 10.30, when he and Peter Nuttall, GOAL's team leader, cut a blue ribbon, flanked by the JCBs and a 12-strong convoy of tractors, washed and shining for the momentous occasion.
Nuttall made a speech, a short one, on the basis that "the biggest need is for action" and Paul Kelly, whose day job involves working as an engineer for Louth County Council, saw them off.
There was a palpable air of achievement and no small neglect of health and safety requirements as people crowded around to see the first load of debris loaded into the first trailer.
Then, amid enormous good will, a reception was laid on in the mosque, with Nice biscuits, spicy delicacies and tea, followed by discussions about latrine design for the refugee camps. The plan is to have 30 tractors working on site within days.
But this little area has a long way to go. The immediate priority is caring for those who have left, either through losing their homes, through trauma, or simple fear of the sea.
How such a small community can cope with so much loss is for another day - but a day that must assuredly be faced up to sooner rather than later.