"We're hearing that a lot," said Sithmini Perera, communication director with World Vision, a private aid agency with offices in Monrovia.
Perera said the scope of the disaster took aid workers by surprise. Furthermore, it happened during the holidays, when many staff members were not only off work but in some cases out of the country.
In the Maldives, a collection of islands in the Indian Ocean visited by thousands of scuba-diving tourists, 19 of 199 inhabited islands were still out of contact. Few are more than 6 feet above sea level, and the giant waves submerged them.
"We can't tell if they have disappeared," said Mohamed Latheef, the country's ambassador to the U.N.
The aid efforts face political challenges too. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, civil conflict is forcing governments to negotiate with rebels to deliver aid.
Indonesia's Aceh province, near the quake's epicenter, is one of the few areas to be hit by both the earthquake and the resulting tsunami, but access is difficult even in normal times because the government has been trying to put down an insurgency there for 28 years.
On Tuesday, the rebel Free Aceh Movement agreed to a cease-fire to allow the delivery of aid. The province's death counts have risen steadily as government and international aid workers reach the area.
"We're not going to arrest the rebels," an Aceh police chief, Lt. Col. Ali Tarunajaya, told Associated Press. "They're looking for members of their families, just like many of our police members are looking for theirs. We're all crying together."
In Sri Lanka, however, the disaster has hardened divisions. Government troops and the rebel Tamil Tigers, who have clashed since 1983 over the Tigers' quest for a homeland, refused to cooperate against the crisis. The Tigers, who control a vast swath in Sri Lanka's north and east, said aid had not reached them and they had been organizing their own relief efforts.
They have also issued separate death tolls, reporting as many as 2,000 people killed by the waves in Tiger territory. The government reports 6,000 dead in areas it controls.
The country's survivors and aid workers face another hazardous legacy of the civil war: landmines unearthed by the waves.
"Mines were ... washed out of known minefields, so now we don't know where they are," Ted Chaiban, the Sri Lanka chief of UNICEF, said in a statement.
