The megathrust, the world's biggest earthquake in 40 years with a magnitude of 9.3, sent shockwaves through the Indian Ocean, unleashing waves up to 15 metres (49 feet) high that raced towards the shores of 11 nations.

The giant walls of water smashed into coastlines, destroying vast swathes of land, swallowing villages and razing buildings from Indonesia to India, Sri Lanka to Thailand. Six hours later they even hit Africa.

The waves wrought devastation as never before. Around 220,000 people were killed, almost two million left homeless and economic damage ran to billions of dollars.

No-one saw them coming, but by the end of the day the whole world knew their name: tsunami.

Behind the staggering statistics were heartrending tales of human tragedy and misery -- children orphaned, babies plucked from their parent's grasp, entire families wiped out.

Such was the scale of the catastrophe that it prompted an unprecedented global relief operation and triggered an outpouring of aid on a scale never before seen, with billions of dollars pledged.

But one year on, the recovery task remains massive. In Aceh, more than 60,000 people still huddle in tents, while hundreds of thousands wait for new homes to be built here, as do tens of thousands in Sri Lanka and India.

"Are we happy with the progress in Aceh? No we are not, at all. There are still 60,000 people in tents today and that's clearly unacceptable a year after the tsunami," Andrew Steer, the World Bank's Indonesia country director, said this week.

"The mistake that was made was not paying enough attention to temporary housing," he said.

The United Nations says that more than 10 billion dollars was pledged that has helped provide everything from new homes to schools and boats in devastated coastal communities, though much of it remains unspent in bank accounts.

The cost of rebuilding Aceh alone is estimated at seven billion dollars, with half so far received.

Survivors around the region also say that the aid effort has been hampered by poor distribution, lack of information, poor management of funds, the slow pace of delivery and outright corruption.

In the poor Thai fishing village of Baan Nam Khem, 26-year-old Duangrat Manu says that while government assistance had poured into her community, residents did not know how to get it.

"Many people in the village don't know what's going on," she says, saying she used her own money to rebuild her house.

And in hard-hit Sri Lanka, a recent report from the country's auditor general Sarath Mayadunne charged that corruption and poor management had doomed the aid effort in the South Asian nation.

"We have seen misappropriation of public funds. It is a lot of money we are talking about," he said, noting that nearly 15,000 families in northwestern Sri Lanka who were not affected by the tsunami had still received monthly pay-outs.

Widow Nanda Kulasena, 48, from Telwatta, southern Sri Lanka, could have used some of those funds.

She lost her husband -- the family's breadwinner -- and now has to provide for a family of six by begging at the town's train station.

"Before my life was filled with happiness and we were well off. My husband made a good living," she told AFP sadly. "Now I just cry, cry, cry. I have become a beggar."

In all affected areas, however, the influx of aid is evident in everything from piles of boxes containing food and medicines to construction machinery used to build houses and infrastructure.

In Baan Nam Khem, Thailand, a primary school received so many donations that it's now a gleaming complex with an expanded programme for toddlers.

Reconstructing property is one thing. However, rebuilding lives is another.

"The children get scared if they hear a voice on a loudspeaker," says teacher Jintana Jampa. "They think it's from the tsunami warning tower."

In Indonesia's Aceh as many as 20,000 kids are believed to have suffered psychological trauma, with 2,155 having lost both their mother and father.

"In some ways, children have made a remarkable recovery," says Andrew Morris from the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Thailand, where an estimated 1,200 children were orphaned.

But he adds: "Psychologically, they are never going to return to the point they were at before the tsunami."

Yet amid the despair, hope emerged.

From the ruins of Aceh, where 168,000 are dead or missing, a stalled peace process was reinvigorated. The province plagued by a longrunning separatist conflict saw a deal signed with Jakarta in August, bringing an end to 29 years of bloodshed that cost 15,000 lives.

"The tsunami pushed up the humanitarian factor to the fore, the need for people to have peace after so much suffering," government negotiator Farid Husain, told AFP. "Our point of view was: how can reconstruction and rehabilitation proceed if the security aspect is not met?"

In Sri Lanka, where 31,000 died in the nation's worst ever disaster, similarly high hopes for an accord between Tamil Tiger rebels and the government evaporated amidst wrangling over aid distribution in rebel areas.

"Yes, the tsunami initially brought the Tamils, the Muslims and the Sinhalese together, but not the politicians," said Tamil politician Dharmalingam Sidhathan.

"For us politicians, anything, even the tsunami is something to play politics with."

Among the tsunami's victims, economically booming India, where 16,389 are dead or missing, declined bilateral aid and set about dealing with its own problems, signalling to the world that it was a giver and not a taker of aid.

In its biggest-ever peacetime relief operation, India sent over 4,000 troops to disaster areas, air-dropped food and dispatched its 140-ship navy, coastal craft and other vessels to deliver medical aid and relief supplies.

The operation was hailed a major success, but even so, more than 50,000 survivors are still housed in temporary tin-roof shelters in southern Nagapattinam, according to Annie George, chief of the NGO Coordination Centre.

The government insists new permanent homes for nearly all those displaced by the tsunami will be ready by March.

With so many missing presumed dead, finding any kind of closure remains hard for many.

In Thailand -- where 5,400 people are listed as dead, almost half of them foreign tourists from 37 countries -- hundreds of bodies still lay unidentified.

DNA experts are still testing body fragments to try and match them to DNA samples provided by relatives of missing people.

Here some people search for their lost loved ones, convinced they are still alive.

Others have summoned the courage to move on.

Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, 25, who lost her boyfriend, British fashion photographer Simon Atlee, while they were on holiday in Phuket, but survived by clinging to a palm tree for eight hours has started a Happy Hearts charity in the US to help children affected by the tsunami.

"It is very strange. Such a bad thing happened, but you can not say it was all black or white. You have so many people who died but the event also created a lot of love and friendship around the world.

"What happened was a reminder of how fragile our lives are."

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