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The village with no child over 10

The Acehnese village of Lambada, where there are almost no children over the age of 10. Picture: Steve Pennells/The West Australian

On the road that leads into Lambada - a small community east of Banda Aceh - a large canvas rests against a wall.

It's a half-finished painting of a giant wave crashing over the village.

"It's not finished yet," says the artist, Bangbang Setyono.

What's missing?

"People scared. People running," he says.

When the 2004 tsunami hit, it dealt one of its cruellest blows to Lambada.

The wave passed beneath fishing boats that had gone out to sea, leaving the fishermen untouched.

But their families onshore were wiped out.

Walking through Lambada now, the thing that strikes you is that you can't see a child over the age of 10, because all bar two of the village's children were killed on Boxing Day 2004.

"Many of the women here, and all the small children, they died," says Anwar, a village elder who was out on his boat when the water took all but one of his immediate family and "hundreds of my relatives".

He says the disaster destroyed the fabric of the small community and turned the men into childless widowers.

Australian aid worker Nichola Krey was one of the first to reach the village in the days after the tsunami.

"There were only two children left, one a 13-year-old and one a nine- ear-old," the Save the Children worker recalls.

"All of the other children had been swept away by the tsunami.

"These two children told me how scared they were - they couldn't see anyone or anything. By the time they surfaced from the water, they couldn't see anyone.

"They felt it was the end of the world. There was nothing but water and debris as far as they could see. They also had zero access to any information - as far as they knew, it was the end of the world."

Ten years on, the laughter of young children can again be heard in the streets.

"When things got back to normal, and the houses were finished, the people from here they went outside and got married again," Anwar says.

"They brought their new wives back here.

"Now there are many women and lots of children."

With Aceh rebuilt from the ground up, the scars that still remain from the tsunami are the ones you can't see.

Almost every surviving child lost family members and some lost more than two-thirds of their schoolmates.

In Aceh and North Sumatra, where dead and missing number more than 230,000 and more than 500,000 were left homeless, people were so busy surviving that they simply weren't able to grieve.

In the months and years afterwards, aid teams turned their focus from food and accommodation shortages to the huge mental health legacy as tens of thousands of survivors tried to deal with unimaginable tragedies.

People didn't want to talk about their losses with each other or seek sympathy because everyone around them had suffered an equal or greater loss.

Many of the young children didn't have the verbal skills to express what they were feeling.

Guilt was also a big problem for many survivors.

Mothers who lost children blamed themselves for not being able to hold on to them when the waters came.

One in five survivors are now believed to have some type of long-term mental health problem. Five per cent of these are severe.

Psychologist Jasmadi Ali, who worked with the survivors in the tsunami's aftermath, said that in the first and second months of 2005 people lost all hope and willpower.

By the third month, fear and uncertainty had taken over their lives. "Acehnese people were not able to cope with the new life," he said. "They were not able to interact with people around them."

The aftershocks that shook Aceh came almost daily, terrifying children.

The arrival of an unprecedented number of well-funded NGOs had an unexpected downside: the cost of living rocketed and has remained high.

Most worrying, Mr Ali says, is the effect on a generation of tsunami children. They are aggressive. And angry.

"They don't feel perfect any more. They are not perfect because they don't have a family any more," Mr Ali says.

"During the tsunami, they were still in primary or secondary school and today they are in the university.

"And even though the tsunami was a very big disaster, kids felt 'wow, I'm still alive after this big disaster.

"I'm still alive today. I'm invincible. I can live for ever'."

In a primary school back in Banda Aceh, a deafening siren wails.

Linda Thaher scrambles her students together and rushes them out of the classroom, joining hundreds of others fleeing through the courtyard.

It's a tsunami drill. A handful of students have been selected to play injured "victims" needing to be rescued by teachers and security guards.

The others flee first outside and then, when a second siren sounds, run upstairs to the highest floor of the school building.

Mrs Thaher used to teach at a school in nearby Lingke.

"We lost 40 per cent of the students," she said.

"In our school here, we teach the students about how to protect themselves.

"I tell them about my experiences. I always tell them about the tsunami. The tsunami made me strong. We have to be strong."