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I expect the Colombo airport to be buzzing with activity. A massive recovery effort is supposedly under way. At Sri Lanka’s main airport, however, there is little sign of it. No C-130s off-loading pallets of water and medicine, no line of trucks picking up supplies. A few Red Cross personnel wait for their colleagues to arrive, but there’s no indication that a catastrophe has just occurred.

We drive south from Colombo, and the farther we go, the worse the scenes of destruction. There are few bulldozers, no heavy earthmoving equipment. In every seaside town we drive through, villagers dig through rubble with their hands, or use crude tools to repair fishing boats splintered by the waves.

Thirty-five thousand people are dead in Sri Lanka. Their bodies have already been found. Another five thousand people have simply vanished.

CNN engineers have set up a satellite dish on the grounds of a destroyed beachfront hotel. Christmas decorations still hang from the lobby ceiling: SEASONS GREETINGS! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Every morning near dawn for the next two weeks, we broadcast live from amid the hotel’s rubble. Then Charlie Moore, my producer, and Phil Littleton, my cameraman, and I pile into a van and drive off, searching along the coast for stories. We end up working around the clock: shooting all day, writing and editing most of the night. Every report is the same: incalculable loss, unspeakable pain.

THE SINGLE WORST scene of carnage in Sri Lanka is just off the main road to Galle. When the tsunami hit, an old train packed with more than a thousand people was knocked off its tracks. At least nine hundred passengers died. For days they were unable to move the railcars and couldn’t get to the bodies trapped in the smashed steel. When we arrive, however, most of the dead have finally been recovered. A few are still pinned underneath the train cars, submerged in ponds of seawater that have turned the ground to mud.

Two dogs brought in by Dutch volunteers search the wreckage. They are cadaver dogs and are specially trained to find dead bodies. The dogs are confused, however, there are so many scents; it’s hard for them to stay focused.

“Everywhere we are searching, we find always bodies,” one of the dog handlers tells me.

One of the demolished railcars came within a few feet of Dhanapala Kalupahana’s house. He and his wife, Ariyawathie, are trying to clean up inside, but there is little they can do. Their roof has collapsed. It wasn’t hit by the train; it fell under the weight of passengers who jumped onto it, trying to escape from the railcar. Several survived, but at least four people fell through the roof and died in Ariyawathie’s living room, right in front of her eyes. She is barely able to speak. Her mother and son were also killed by the wave.

“Mother, no body. Son, no body” is all she can say.

Outside their home the jungle has become a gnarled mass of steel and mud, splintered trees, rotting flesh, and broken bones. I climb into a train car that was knocked off the tracks. Passengers’ possessions are strewn about—a plate of food, a little girl’s purse. Handprints smear the walls, a mixture of mud and blood. Everyone aboard drowned. Later I learn that the name of the train was Samudra Devi, the Goddess of the Sea.

AT TIMES, WORKING in news is like playing a giant game of telephone. Someone reports something, and everyone else follows suit. The truth gets lost along the way.

“What about the kidnapped children?” a producer in New York asks.

“What kidnapped children?” I say.

“They claim lots of storm orphans are being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.

“Everyone,” the producer responds. “It’s being reported all over the place.”

“We’ll look into it,” I respond, which is usually the only way to end such a conversation.

Child trafficking is a major problem, especially in Southeast Asia, but when we start checking the kidnapping story being reported on other networks and papers, it seems slim on facts. It’s mostly just aid workers worrying that children