THE boy in the Mickey Mouse T-shirt crouched over the drawing paper on the floor of the temple, pen in hand, his face scrunched up in concentration.

With a flourish he drew the curve of a wave, arcing high across the white expanse. Below he sketched a few black shapes lying on the ground. “They are people,” he said, matter of factly. “They are dead.”

Pens and paper are just some of the weapons child counsellors in Sri Lanka are using in the battle against the demons that inhabit the minds of the young survivors of the tsunami.

Now that the immediate struggle for survival has abated with the arrival of food and medicines, aid organisations are turning their attention to the psychological wounds left behind. Among this group of fishermen’s children squatting on the floor of a Buddhist temple there are tales of horror and tragedy to fill a book.

Ranjan, 11, saw his mother and sister swept away from in front of their house as he clung to a coconut palm. Madusha, 6, saw her sister crushed by a wall and disappear under the water.

Gayan, who looks much smaller than his 15 years, was saved by his older brother, only to then see him drown. “I see him all the time in my dreams,” he said as the other children listened, the younger ones fidgeting but still rapt. “Last night I saw him and woke up shaking.”

But he chose not to trouble his mother with his night terrors, nor did he tell her about them when they awoke the next morning. “She is in pain already,” he said. “If I tell her she will only be in more pain.”

With parents too traumatised or too busy trying to rebuild homes and lives to listen to their children, counsellors like Chandra and Lakmal have stepped in.

They are medical graduates recruited by Unicef to encourage children to share what they have suffered and, in doing so, help to prevent more serious psychological damage.

Children between the ages of 8 and 15 are most at risk. Experts say that 40 per cent could be affected if they are not treated, and the rush is on to reach them. The best cure for such trauma is simple, they say: for the children to talk over what happened as soon as possible.

“They have seen things they never should have seen, the stuff of nightmares,” Martin Dawes, Unicef’s spokesman said. The camps are full of signs of traumatised children. Nervousness, listlessness, a lack of interest in play, a refusal to talk and an inability to sleep are all common. Rajit, 14, admits that he suffers nightmares. “I cannot sleep here,” he said. “

I keep thinking it will happen again.”

Madusha said that she too saw things in her sleep. “I see my sister who is gone playing with me,” she said. “I cry when I wake and she isn’t here.”

The children took pens and papers from the counsellors and were asked to draw the camp they are living in and where in it they go for help. It is a way to move them on from thinking only of the bad, and mostly it is working. In this camp only Ranjan still draws pictures of the dead. “We saw a lot of it in the first two weeks after the tsunami but it is petering out now,” Chandra said.

After the talking and drawing, it was time for play. All the games have a point the children may not be aware of: to build trust between them and to work as a team. “We are not here all the time,” Lakmal said. “They will be the ones to help each other get over this. For most, play is the best recovery.”

Madusha said that the talking bit was hard. “It made me think of the wave again,” she said. “But I felt happy when I was playing. I will play it again when I feel sad. And I’ll think of my sister playing it with me.”

EFFECTS STILL BEING FELT

Nasa scientists studying the recent earthquake calculate that it:

The surface of ocean rose and fell in an unusual pattern. The tsunami may have bounced around South Africa or off Antarctica then passed up into the South Atlantic

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