The Tsunami, the deadliest natural disaster in recent times, was made globally real by the sheer immediacy of numerous personal videos and the tragic deaths of not only residents but tourists with loved ones throughout the world. Many of us know somebody who knows somebody who was caught in the gigantic wave that violently hit shores of the Indian Ocean on 26th December 2004.

I filmed the damage in southern Sri Lanka in 2005, when tents were still home to thousands, four months after the event. People were still hurting and the government was being blamed for their still not having their lives back. Rubble was everywhere. It looked like things would never be rebuilt.

Earlier in 2005, I’d produced a film for the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, using BBC footage that shocked me – aerial shots of seemingly endless bloated dead bodies floating off Banda Aceh. These things stick in the memory and when filming in Indonesia a year later, the cameraman told me what it had been like. Dendy Montgomery is from Banda, an Acehnese who filmed the wave destroy half of his home city, 20 of his relatives and 50 friends. His recollections were too traumatic for him to easily share them.

Three years later and I was asked to make a film that looked at what had happened five years after the disaster. I was to return to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives. There were those personal videos made on mobile phones and the footage of numerous TV companies to compare then and now. There had been the massive and compassionate response from around the world that had almost shamed governments into matching the money raised. Agencies like the UN and NGOs had had plenty of time to make a difference. There would still be painful memories but young children would perhaps not remember. Life would, hopefully, have moved on and lessons been learnt.

Just as I was about to leave, another powerful earthquake hit Penang, south of Banda Aceh – this area really is the most prone in the “ring of fire”. I had planned on going there but to try to force aid workers to talk of a previous disaster was not viable if not downright insensitive. I had to think of an alternative, while filming in the Maldives, and tried to find Dendy’s address. Would he want to talk? Was he around? Would he remember me?

Dendy, who is remarkably upbeat, was indeed at home in Banda Aceh and only too pleased to meet up. He still had his very old Land Rover with which to rumble around the capital of Aceh Province. And the memories were still raw. On the surface, there are many new houses, but you can still easily see rubble. There is the prestigious Tsunami Museum, next to the Great Mosque, but there’s nothing in it, Dendy said. He still can’t get over how roads have disappeared and new ones appeared. He took me to the temporary housing, row after row of well built wooden long houses that seem to be more alive with people than the colourful new ones. There are the mass graves that don’t belie the sheer numbers buried within them. There are boats still on roofs and signs that indicate evacuation routes should another tsunami happen. They are a little rusty now and don’t seem to be consistent. The money has been spent, but perhaps a little haphazardly.

I spent the night with Dendy and his wife Raihan in their tiny new home. Like many, they are having a hard time making ends meet. After five years they, with their two young sons, are grateful for all the help that poured in, but the region is sinking back to its previous, largely forgotten state.

In Sri Lanka, I could directly compare then and now. There is much rubble still around, with grass growing over. There is less evidence of new housing and the lowest caste, for this is a society based on ancient social divisions, still live in structures that are just about standing but which were severely damaged. Little graveyards are dotted about and there are extravagant monuments which are visited by tourists, momentarily stopping off to photograph them on the way to somewhere else. Through a friends charity I know that little has changed. Fishermen’s wives still make lace but their income is still only two dollars a day. Poverty reduction is now included in Government disaster mitigation policy, but it’s something to talk about at rather plush meetings in the capital, Colombo, rather than implement.

In India, Government reaction to the tsunami is noticeably translated into enthusiastic training for disaster. Whole villages now know where to go and what to do. In Orissa, a poor state, the danger is more realistically from flooding and cyclones, and large shelters have been built that can accommodate a thousand at a time. In Bangladesh flooding is so frequent that large numbers have been built, but you wonder if there are enough for India’s millions. Sagiraika from an NGO called Seeds agrees, and she is terrific at motivating school children into a sense of urgency about disasters they have no experience of.

Like Sri Lanka and India, the Maldives has a well worked out early warning system; in fact it’s lavish and looks like the foyer of a swish ultra modern hotel. Again, one gets the feeling the funding allocations were a bit “heat of the moment”. One also can’t help feeling sorry for the Maldives – with nowhere higher than two metres, there is literally no higher ground to run to. But the haphazard response to the tsunami is evident here too. I was amazed to learn that there are still nearly a thousand internally displaced people, even if the President said “a thousand families”.

What was most obvious, five years on, is that the Tsunami hurt the poor most and that they have received the least help. There is still much evidence of the damage done and of prestigious spending. People don’t like to dwell on the tragedy but I found they had mostly found a way to cope.

Ashley Bruce Director of “Building better for next time” 18/12/09