How Tsunami Survivors Rebuild Their Lives

Moh

amad Dahnal places his crutches carefully against the wall of the tent and sits down in front of the camp administrator. His narrow 38-year-old face is etched with apprehension born of the powerlessness that makes displaced people fear authority. But this is to be a good day — the best, in fact, the best Dahnal has had since the wall of black water roared over his house just before 8 a.m. last December 26, taking one of his three children away forever and leaving his wife Fikriah in hospital for two months.  

“I have good news,” says Abdul Rozak Bashir, the soft spoken former electrician who runs the camp. “You have been picked to be one of the first to move into the new houses in Banda Aceh. You and your family can move on December 24.” Dahnal doesn't react for a moment, taking it in. Then he breaks into a cautious grin that expresses as much relief as happiness. For ten long months, he and his family have been living in a 10-by-13 foot tent in the camp outside of the city. Now he will have a permanent home of his own. And the brand new motorcycle pedicab he has been given by the British charity Oxfam (brightly decked out in a fresh coat of blue, pink and green paint, and named Winda after his eldest daughter) gives him the means to support his family.  

Back in his tent, he tells Fikriah the good news. She too seems a little dazed at first, her mind casting back to the moment the waters plucked her five-year-old son from her arms, then buried her under a pile of rubble from which Dahnal pulled her eight hours later. “I really miss my son,” she says, her hand absent-mindedly patting her belly. Like many of the other women in the camp, is pregnant. “That's why I want to have this new child so much.” Dahnal nods. “Before I rented my house and motorcycle. Now I will have my own place and my own motorcycle and a new baby,” he says wondrously. “It's hard for me to believe that so much has changed in a year.”  

Bouncing back

That sentiment is shared by many who were in Banda Aceh in the days following the tsunami that killed nearly 200,000 around the region and left well over a million homeless. As the capital of the Indonesian province hardest hit, Banda Aceh saw close to one third of its population of 260,000 wiped out in a matter of ten terrible minutes. In the weeks and months that followed, hundreds of relief workers and millions of dollars in aid poured in to clear the putrid black mud, the tens of thousands of corpses and the piles of debris that clogged the city's streets. But residents could only focus on the immediate challenges of feeding the homeless, tending to the injured and hoping to prevent untold further deaths from infectious diseases.  

Now, one year later, in some downtown areas of Banda Aceh there are few signs of the impact of one of history's worst recorded natural disasters. In the lobby of the Hotel Sultan, choked with corpses in the tsunami's wake, Thai and Chinese businessmen and relief workers from Europe and North America chat over cups of thick Acehnese coffee. The streets outside are choked with traffic, cars and SUVs — many bearing the logos of international and local aid organizations — jockey for space with swarms of motorcycles. Shops hawking mobile phones and pirated DVDs (everything from the raunchy American Pie 2, the unrated version, to 50s Biblical epics like The Robe) are doing a brisk trade. Many buildings boast fresh coats of paint, and where signs of damage are still visible, it is mostly on buildings in the early stages of repair work.  

The achievements of local and international aid groups and the Indonesian government in Aceh have been nothing short of remarkable: The immediate needs of the homeless were swiftly addressed, thousands of houses have been built and construction is underway on roads, bridges, sewerage systems, hospitals and other infrastructure destroyed by the tsunami. And this in the context of a bloody 27-year war between the central government and insurgents seeking independence for Aceh. In August, the two sides signed a peace agreement ending hostilities that have claimed some 12,000 lives.  

Crying out for capital

But the signs of progress can be deceptive, warns Scott Campbell, who heads up local operations for the U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services. “We've had people come in here in the last month or two and look around and say, ‘Everything seems fine. What's the problem here?' ” Campbell and other relief officials stress that the task ahead remains daunting. Only one fifth of the 1.8 million people left homeless by the tsunami in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India will be living in permanent structures by the first anniversary of the catastrophe, according to estimates by Oxfam International. Tens of thousands of displaced Acehnese are crammed into makeshift wooden barracks where they seem likely to stay for the foreseeable future. Others are stubbornly camped out on the remains of their homes.

Irnawati, 51, lives with three of her four children in a UN-supplied tent above the foundation stone of what had been her home in Banda Aceh's Lampase district. A few neighboring tents aside, hardly a building stands for miles in several directions in what had once been one of the city's most densely populated neighborhoods. Apart from the tent and a daily water delivery by truck, Irnawati says she has received no aid at all. “I think a lot of money came but it got ‘lost' in Jakarta, and here in Aceh too,” she says bitterly. “It certainly never came to any of us around here. No one is offering to rebuild my house or lend me any money. Before the tsunami, I was a successful businesswoman. That's all I need, a little capital to get started.”  

Catholic Relief and other aid organizations are developing the sort of micro loan programs for which many Achenese like Irnawati are crying out, but the vetting of borrowers and administering repayments is logistically challenging and time-consuming. Still, they can be very effective: Sitting on the wooden bench of his coffee stall in Logkna, another part of the city almost completely destroyed, 48-year-old father of four Laffan points to a pile of rubble 300 feet away. “That's where my original coffee shop was before the waters came,” he says. He managed to rebuild with a loan of $1500 from the Indonesian People's Bank, in a prime spot where the local lumber mills front onto the main coastal road. “I get business from the mill and from truckers and have already repaid the loan,” he says proudly. His house, he says is being rebuilt by a foreign aid organization and he hopes to move back soon. Will life be back to normal then, back to what it was before the tsunami? “Nothing will ever be the same. Many friends and family from my village are gone. But I can feed my family and send my children to school. You can't ask much more.”