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News is slow to travel in Seychelles, and with the power out we were cut off. Cell phones weren't working effectively, but eventually calls starting coming through from people on the east side of the island: town was flooded; bridges were gone; there were fish on the runway at the airport.

Since Mark's parents live right on the beach, we decided we should get home while the getting was good so he could make his way to their place to check on things. It wasn't until we reached the road at the bottom of Gay's mountain that we learned the extent of the water's damage so far ... the roads were closed in both directions, but the little one over the hill to our place was open and we could get home.

We were all fine and no one in the family suffered damage. Friends, however, had 6 feet of water wash through their house ... three times ... and another had windows and doors sucked completely away. Keith and Maryvonne watched as their 14-year-old son, Ben, was caught in a wave and disappeared. They spent a horrid 20 minutes or so before learning that he'd managed to grab and hold on to a firmly-rooted mango tree and was just fine.

Three people in Seychelles lost their lives and there were millions of rupees in damage, some are only now being repaired ... and we're thousands of miles from the bit of ocean floor that split and dropped and shook.

How many people in total died will never be known, but one year later the figure was conservatively estimated at 216,000 in eleven countries.

In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, different agencies within the same governments disagree. Thailand has lost track of how many people previously listed as missing have now been accounted for.

The confusion is partly a result of the tragedy’s scale — the massive earthquake that struck off the Sumatran coast on Dec. 26 killed an untold number in Indonesia’s Aceh province, even before the giant waves crashed into the coastlines of a dozen countries.

Tens of thousands of bodies were washed out to sea, local government offices were destroyed and personal records lost.

This huge number does not in any way reflect on the numbers who suffered from injury and loss.

The response to the disaster that was the Indian Ocean Tsunami was astounding. More than $10 billion was donated, much coming from individuals, from all over the world. Religious, ethnic and racial barriers dropped, and even the war-torn country of Sri Lanka united in grief and loss.

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