Tsunami children pray at makeshift school in Sri Lanka
Children pray in front of a thatched classrom after their beach-side Catholic school in Mullaittivu is washed away by the tsunami in the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka, an area ravaged also by civil war. .Out of the 768 students at the Mullaittivu Maga Vidylalyam secondary school, 88 died in the waves, 28 lost both parents and 160 lost one parent. The school's reconstruction is aided by UNICEF..The December 26, 2004 tsunami killed around 40,000 people along Sri Lanka's southern, eastern and northern shores, tearing thousands of families apart. .The bulk of the dead were women and children - husbands lost young brides and around 4,000 children lost one or both parents. .Even before the tsunami struck, people here in the northeast had already been displaced four times by the Tigers' two-decade war for autonomy. .In some places, the scars of war and the tsunami have become one. Remnants of walls torn down by waves are pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel from shells fired before a 2002 ceasefire plunged a civil war that killed over 64,000 people into limbo. ..Picture taken March 2005 by Justin Jin
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