True cost and psychological toll of the December quake emerges as the Pacific country grapples with its third major disaster in two years

Last month in the small settlement of Mele Maat, just outside Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, Alice Hawel was preparing lunch when the ground began to shake. She cowered on the dirt floor as giant boulders flew past the kitchen from the hillside above, sending a rock the size of a small car crashing through the thatched roof of one house, narrowly missing the bed where her grandmother slept. When it was over, the landslide had gouged a huge scar through their property, and Hawel heard the cries: “Mummy, mummy.”

She scrambled outside to find her son Samuel, 3, buried up to his chin in rubble. She and her niece Kendra, 8, dug him out; when she clutched him to her, he miraculously had only a few scratches on his back.