"They don't want handouts, they just want theirs lives," she said.

Here Totten tells a story of one family:

There are still more than 67,000 survivors living in tents a year later, one and a half times the entire population of the City of San Clemente. Imagine each man, woman and child in the city of San Diego (a population of more than 1.2 million) all being displaced from their homes. Many are suffering from the same condition, depression and anxiety. That is current day life in Banda Aceh, one year later.

Rita, 20, and her sister Dewi, 27, lived with their family in a neighborhood that was in the direct path of the waves. Before Dec. 26, 2004 - which was an absolutely beautiful morning - there were about 6,000 homes there. They are now gone. Many even had the foundations washed away.

What's left of Rita's house, which was completely flooded, is the white concrete. There is a well with drinking water, but the water is black.

What's also still left behind are the small lakes of water filled with disease and the one next to Rita's house held the smell of death. It's truly unmistakable, and the fact Banda Aceh had more than 100,000 deaths and we arrived within a week, the sights and smells will always remain with me.

The typical layout of city streets in Banda Aceh became a conduit of extended nightmares. Miles from shore rushing water carried the bloated dead, building debris, cars and the incredible ships and barges that would finally stop and remain behind as the water went back to the ocean.

Rita told me her story in July when she was ready to talk and I was not surrounded by lots of others waiting to talk. We sat in her temporary shelter and she disappeared and came back with a photo album.

She began to show me family pictures and talked about the waves, all four of them. She talked about the screaming and fear and the bodies and all the other debris coming at them. Her little 4-year-old nephew Aji just stared at me as she spoke.

Rita also told me what it was like in the 9.0 earthquake that happened less than an hour before the tsunami that had so many in utter chaos trying to save people crushed by the concrete buildings falling. The earth shook so hard people were thrown from their motorbikes and tossed about like rag dolls.

She told me about her father trying desperately to help his family get to higher ground, and then she told me about his death from too much water in his lungs.

Then Rita showed me the photos of her father lying on the floor of the all but destroyed house, as she read the verses over his body as part of their funeral ceremony. In the photo were the rest of the girls and their mom.

Since there are five sisters and her mother that remain, who are now living in different places. She is the youngest and must work as much as she can to help build their home where they all will live. It is quite small to begin with, but their culture is different from ours.

Rita is a beautiful young lady, five years younger than my daughter and she likes to be cuddled just as my daughter. I sat and watched her face and felt the guilt of survivors and what they endure because there is always something in their mind that says they should have done more, even though reality is there was absolutely nothing she could have done. It hurt to watch Rita, and I also tried to imagine what if this were my daughter telling this story to a stranger.

Partners World's goal was to try to be effective in the lives of those we could help on community levels. It is very difficult to single out one or two people, you must be respectful of a culture and assist the group.

The area we remained is the neighborhood we started our journey the first week of January 2005. We rented a house right up the street from the mosque where we camped alongside the 500-plus refugees.

We first met Rita and Dewi when they came to our Partners House and asked for work. They cleaned the house and assisted the teams, we had up to 27 Westerners at time staying in the house.

When the tsunami left the news and the teams began to fade away, it was time to find another way to help Rita, Dewi and their family longer term. They requested a food cart, (Warung in Bahasa Indonesian) and we purchased it for them. This would allow them to have their own source of income.

They do an incredible job, these girls get up around 4 a.m. each day and prepare food. For us eating out seems a luxury, but in many South East Asian countries it is typical and extremely cheap. They look for employment where they can, it's difficult. For a while Rita was also working with our friend Jack in a business

artners helped him start. Jack lost 131 family members that morning, yet never left our side the first week we were there, but he's another story.

The problem is, most of their neighborhood was affected and the other people in the area are struggling and without income.

These two girls are just two of the young people we had the privilege to work with and assist. The first week we had university students become our translators, and we kept them working as long as the teams kept coming.

Aceh was a closed province and yet the kids were learning English, but had no Westerners to practice communication skills. To see these kids, teenagers to early 20's, finally having the chance to converse with us was incredible, the fact it was to translate stories of how long people lay trapped in rubble before being found to our medical teams or retell the endless stories of death still haunts me.

As the first year of the tsunami has passed, my only hope is that people will realize that for the residents of Banda Aceh, the trauma is not over. From Nov. 5 to

ec. 5, 2005 alone, they had 27 earthquakes measuring from Magnitude 4.0 to 6.2.

A wall of water caused horrific tragedy and also left a door open to the people of this closed province to the outside world.