Tsunami survivor: Baby brought me luck

Fitrie Ani was three months pregnant when she heard neighbors in her corner of Banda Aceh screaming: "The sea is rising! The sea is rising!"

A wall of water twice as high as a house engulfed communities like Ani's around the Indian Ocean, from Indonesia to East Africa, the day after Christmas 2004, leaving some 200,000 people dead or missing in 12 countries in a tsunami that the U.S. Geological Survey says caused more casualties than any other in recorded history.

Ani was also unable to fight the swirling vortex of water. She was carried on the currents far out to sea, where she drifted semi-conscious for more than ten hours.

Five years on, her neighborhood has been rebuilt, with homes made of wood and concrete, but little inside. The roads, bridges and mosques are better than you would find in an average Indonesian town.

The baby she was carrying in her womb the last time we met is now a healthy four-and-a-half-year-old boy named Zahri. He is a child of the tsunami -- carried on the killer waves that spared him and his mother but took so many others.