Asian children tell harrowing tales

British girl, Tilly Smith,10, who is credited with saving 100 lives by alerting people of the coming waves during the 2004 tsunami answers questions of the press along with her mother during the first anniversary of the Asian disaster in Phuket, southern Thailand yesterday.. PHOTO: AFP

The exhibit, at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and entitled "After the Tsunami", features among other things a screen on which pictures of the children roll by as loudspeakers play recordings of the children's accounts.

In the first room, painted pale green, visitors can sit in comfortable armchairs and listen.

"Now we are all going to return to Thailand. I think that will be good, because we'll see that there is something positive, that it has changed a lot, that they are getting by and so maybe I can also get by," says Johanna, a 15-year-old Swedish survivor.

Michael, 11, is from India. "I think of my mother when I'm alone, and that's why I always try to make sure that I'm not alone. I always try to be with other kids so I don't have all these thoughts," he says.

And Safriani, a 17-year-old from Banda Aceh in Indonesia, says she sometimes comforts herself by wearing a tee-shirt that belonged to her twin sister who was lost in the waves.

The exhibit will stay in Stockholm for five months before travelling throughout Sweden. While it is small-scale to start -- it currently features accounts from two Swedish and seven Asian children -- organisers hope it will grow as other survivors come forward to share their own stories and contribute objects to the display.

Primarily targeting children and adolescents, organisers hope to build a bond between children in the Northern Hemisphere and those in the ravaged regions in the South.