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Improvements seen four years after the Indian Ocean tsunami
Four years since a 9.0-magnitude earthquake spawned massive walls of water that swept across the Indian Ocean, leaving more than 230,000 dead according to a United Nations estimate, improvements can be seen in many of the devastated areas, humanitarian groups said.
Hundreds of thousands were left homeless and jobless after the tsunami, and poor and isolated communities were left even worse off.
Today, new schools have been constructed, and armies of workers -- many of them volunteers -- have cleared and rebuilt homes and towns, and helped get people back to work.
"The tsunami, despite being a horrific event, also provided a lot of opportunities for those countries," said Jonathan Cauldwell, chief of UNICEF's Tsunami Transition Support.
"It brought a peace dividend within Banda Aceh (Indonesia) where you still see peace in an area which had long term localized conflict in place. It allowed those areas to be built up as well, to have investments in the infrastructure in the social