‘We cannot forget that day. Even now we are afraid of the sea. But we are fishermen and we have to live from the sea.’

Fisherman Thomas Jaysuriya and his family survived. But everything they owned – from their fishing boat and their home to their children’s school uniforms – was destroyed.

Chinatharanjini, 29, surveyed the site where her house once stood some 50km from the shore in Kalutara, Sri Lanka. ‘We have to start all over again,’ she said.

These stories are replicated thousands of times across the countries of the Indian Ocean. Tim Hetherington’s sharp, insightful photos give us a sense of the scale both of the destruction and of the task of rebuilding.

Rebuilding after a disaster whose destruction was so complete is the biggest challenge aid agencies and governments have faced in decades. According to the World Bank, rebuilding India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka alone will cost US$7.2 billion and take years. Rehousing the homeless is a task equivalent to building new homes for the entire city of Birmingham.

A few seconds
For many of our partners, already working in the hardest-hit villages, the tsunami was not only a humanitarian but a personal tragedy. ‘Their whole future was destroyed in a few seconds,’ our partner Sneha wrote of the 49 villages where it works and where it lost two of its staff.

Our partners helped 500,000 people this year. They have given fishing communities boats, nets and equipment, and baskets and scales for women fish vendors. Around 55,000 people have been supplied with new homes.

Government bans on building along the shoreline have hindered the distribution of land and slowed the process of permanent reconstruction. Even a year on, and despite the end of the building ban in Sri Lanka, who is allowed to build where, and who will be given new land, is not yet clear.

‘We are hopeful’
But although hundreds of thousands of people remain in tents in Indonesia, along the coastlines of Sri Lanka and India, new homes dot the landscape and there is a new energy in the air. People are carrying bricks and sand and the sound of hammering can be heard.

‘Life has been difficult for me and my family,’ says Madhi, 35, standing in a boatyard in southern India. ‘But we are hopeful now that life will get back to normal.’