A dozen young children chatter and giggle around me , taking my pad and pen to write down their addresses very carefully . This way , they tell me , I 'll know where to send help . But how do you tell a six-year-old an address no longer means anything -- houses and roads are gone and in too many cases , so are families . It was not just the young who could not comprehend how their world changed on December 26 , 2004 . In Hambantota on the south coast of Sri Lanka , a parent stumbled through mangled debris in the area they assumed their house had once stood , looking for lost children . Siblings , children , cousins , all looking for a sign of relatives they lost in a split second when the water came . Standing in the middle of what was once the marketplace of this seaside town , I looked around at a landscape that was almost flat . No buildings for miles , giving a clear view of the sea that was deceptively calm and serene . Only one temple was left standing , the one structure built from concrete . Homes were washed away with residents still inside , market stalls and thousands of shoppers did n't stand a chance against the sheer force of mother nature . It is impossible to capture the extent of the devastation on camera and only those who lived through that day know its true horror . But one overwhelming memory for those who arrived afterward is the look in survivors ' eyes . I accompanied a U.S. doctor working for Americares , Jonathan Fine , who had volunteered to help and deliver desperately needed supplies . He told me he would never forget `` the victims , dead-eyed in their hospital beds , lying there , staring at us , wondering what their stories were , how they 'll ever learn to cope with this , what they 've seen , what they 've lost . '' And yet in the midst of the misery I witnessed in Sri Lanka was incredible generosity . Residents who had lost everything , who had seen horror beyond imagination , running up to us to offer a face mask to help cope with the unmistakeable stench of death , trying to give us a bottle of water . One man even apologized we were not seeing his country at its best , begging me to come back when it was all over so I could experience the true beauty and hospitality of the island and its people . He then resumed the search for his brother , sister and parents . The sheer scale of the disaster was difficult to overstate . One Hambantota hospital that could take 300 patients at a push saw 1,000 serious injuries in the first two days alone . Basic drugs many of us take for granted ran out quickly and the bottleneck of relief , familiar in such disasters , took time to clear . And yet rarely did I see frustrations spill over . Residents helped each other and comforted each other . One textile factory had been badly damaged , some of the workers were dead or missing . But rather than wait for outside help to arrive , the workers cleared the building of mud , debris and bodies so they could go back to work . Many of the women were married to fishermen who had lost boats or were too scared to go back out on the water . Without the factory , their families had no income . Natural disasters are cruel and brutal . There is no one to blame and little comprehension . And yet they never fail to restore my faith in human nature . Strangers work together to pick themselves back up and rebuild their shattered lives . Many thinking of others rather than themselves . What I witnessed in Sri Lanka was both heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time .
CNN 's Paula Patton was in Hambantota in 2004 when disaster struck . The landscape was nearly flat after the earthquake , with buildings washed away . Amid incredible devastation , scenes of incredible humanity and generosity .