Deny Syahputra, 24, lives alone in a wooden house built by an aid agency after his parents, sisters and a brother were swept away in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that smashed into this Indonesian port town. ?I hope that my family are in heaven now,? he said yesterday as prayers commemorating the disaster began at a nearby mosque.

?When I remember, I feel sad, but I realise I'm not alone in having this experience. It kind of gives me comfort to know that other people also suffer the same thing,? he said.

Two years on, Indian Ocean communities have made impressive strides in recovering from a mind-boggling disaster, thanks to an army of aid workers and an astounding outpouring of charity across the world.

But tens of thousands of people are still living in temporary shelters in Indonesia?s Aceh province, worst-hit by the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami that killed or left missing about 230,000 people along the Indian Ocean rim and left around 1.5 million homeless.

And the psychological scars are still fresh for many people who lost entire families to the monstrous waves.

Syahputra was selling fish when he felt the 9.1 magnitude quake that triggered the waves. He tried to rescue a neighbour?s child before the waves swept her from his arms and carried him for several kilometres, he said.

<B>169, 000 dead or missing in Aceh alone</B>

He was one of 600,000 people in Aceh who lost their livelihoods after the disaster. He is selling fish again in Ulee Lheue, a ghost town after the tsunami but now rapidly recovering with ferries and fishing boats using rebuilt port facilities.

Even so, the population of the town near Aceh?s capital of Banda Aceh, 1,700 km (1,060 miles) northwest of Jakarta, is only about 700 now, a fraction of what it was before the disaster.

The tsunami left around 169,000 dead or missing in Aceh alone and killed at least three times as many women as men in places such as Ulee Lheue, leaving virtual bachelor towns in coastal regions. Aid groups and the agency charged with Aceh reconstruction, BRR, have built 57,000 houses for the half million people displaced by the disaster. Another 20,000 are still being built.

While the home rebuilding effort has been slow, reconstruction is evident throughout the province, where aid agencies have spent billions of dollars on the recovery effort.

In one city market, Nursidah, 30, told Reuters as she shopped for groceries: ?Activity here is very much like before the tsunami.?

Yon Thayrun, a spokesman for aid group Oxfam, told Reuters: ?Actually, if we want to be honest, reconstruction has gone very well. You can imagine we are not building like one subdistrict but we are rebuilding an area the size of Liverpool.?

Transporting rebuilding materials, particularly to areas outside Banda Aceh, has been a major logistical hurdle because the quake and tsunami ruined the main coastal highway, he said.

Thayrun estimated 70,000 people are still in temporary housing, a much higher figure than the BRR?s 45,000. With aid pledges totalling $13.05 billion for tsunami-affected nations, in addition to the billions set aide by governments in the affected regions, there is no shortage of money for rebuilding.

<B>An unusually strong response</B>

The tsunami disaster generated an unusually strong response from non-traditional aid groups ? nearly two-fifths of the money pledged came from private individuals and companies. The UN Office of the Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery says the unprecedented disaster and its unprecedented response yielded valuable lessons in disaster recovery, including:

● The importance of disaster preparedness

●Recognising families and communities must drive their own recovery

● Promoting fairness and equity in reconstruction

● Coordinating well with the expanding number of non-governmental organisations, big and small

●The crucial role of information sharing to recovery

●Creating conditions for entrepreneurs to flourish.

<B>Violence mars Sri Lanka tsunami commemoration two years on</B>

Church and temple bells tolled across Sri Lanka yesterday for the victims of the 2004 tsunami but commemoration ceremonies in rebel-held areas, which were the worst hit, will be deliberately low-key. While the Sinhalese dominated south has picked up the pieces and moved quickly to rebuild, the war-torn, Tamil Tiger-controlled northeast which took the brunt of the waves has been left pretty much on its own. A resurgence in Sri Lanka?s long-running civil war this year has added to the sense of desperation in the east, with thousands of Tamils including tsunami survivors fleeing homes and camps for the second time in two years.

?There isn?t much to show for by way of reconstruction, there isn?t much to commemorate when you have barely moved an inch,? said a Western aid official involved in the tsunami relief.

S.P. Puleedevan, the head of the peace secretariate of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam told ?Reuters? from the de facto rebel capital of Kilinochchi that there was going to be a tsunami ceremony but he did not give any details. President Mahinda Rajpakse and Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake travelled to Galle and nearby Paraliya in the south for ceremonies to remember the more than 35,000 people who died in the country's worst natural disaster. The government has urged Sri Lankans to observe two minutes of silence at the precise moment the tsunami struck two years ago. The government says that 98 percent of the tsunami reconstruction in the country?s south is complete, amounting to nearly 25,000 houses.

But in the east less than half of the planned 60,000 houses have been completed, while in the Tamil Tiger-held north -- cut off from the rest of the island because of the conflict -- less than 30 percent of houses for tsunami-displaced are finished. ?While the tsunami affected Sinhala people are resettling in new homes, the worst affected Tamils are being chased even from their temporary shelters,? the LTTE said in a lengthy statement issued on the eve of the tsunami anniversary. It accused the government of deliberately neglecting Tamils who it said made up two-thirds of those affected by the tsunami.

?The government treated the tsunami as a welcome means of destroying the Tamil people,? the LTTE said. But aid agencies said both the military and Tigers hamper access to conflict areas, and artillery duels have made it too dangerous for aid workers to operate, forcing many organisations to shelve or abandon tsunami projects altogether.

?The tsunami could have been a turning point in the conflict, if both parties had agreed on an aid-sharing pact,? said the Western aid official.