He now shares the concrete floor of a boys' school with about 1,500 homeless people whose living conditions worsened on Tuesday as the village of Karaitivu and the surrounding eastern district of Ampara was again hit by downpours.

Deesanth's grandmother, Pramasotha Thambirasa, 33, holds him as he wets the concrete floor.

"So many children are here, about 500 children," said Savaguru Puvaneswaran, 28, a teacher staying at the school with his sister's three children. His sister died in the tsunami.

Some 200 children in the camp have been orphaned, he said. Many, like Deesanth, still have their fathers.

"There are no sanitation facilities. Disease will spread," he added, gesturing around the poorly-lit building.

Homeless people waded through ankle-deep murky water to get in and out of the school. After similar heavy rains, the assembly hall flooded on Saturday while a nearby camp had to be evacuated.

But children still found some amusement.

To the side of the school building, they ran their toes through flooded pools as they played on swings fashioned from multicoloured saris tied around pipes or beams.

Youngsters like Bainustigan Magandran, 3, sat cross-legged among circles of women. He lost his mother to the waves. Thousands of women and children were caught by the tsunami or crushed by debris. Magandran's father survived.

Most male survivors spent Tuesday wandering through Kalmunai's beachside fishing villages, where the rain added to the bleakness.

Pools left by the giant waves had swollen, turning piles of rubble -- the remnants of houses -- into tiny islands.

A group of Muslims stood under umbrellas beside a row of sandy graves. Men shovelled mud and debris out of a house where the stench of a corpse removed the day before still lingered.

A mechanical digger slowly worked its way down a road, lifting slabs of brick from the mud, the first sign of a clean-up operation that locals fear will take years.

Some in Kalmunai feel they are being neglected.