Bill Tarrant, Lamkruet – The tents are like ovens in the scorching sun and leak in the rain. The children have no toys and their fathers have no jobs. The food's grim and the ground turns into cesspools in a downpour.

Life in hundreds of tent camps across Indonesia's tsunami-devastated countryside on the northern tip of Sumatra island is brutal. Their residents can only hope it will be short. "They say we can move to semi-permanent homes in July but that's not certain," said Safri, a burly, 36-year-old dentist who looks out of place in dress shirt and pressed slacks in this tattered tent camp near the Aceh provincial capital, Banda Aceh. "We were supposed to move this month."

It's a question they ask every visitor: After months of living in what Indonesia calls Spontaneous Settlement Camps, when can they at least move to temporary wooden barracks, not to mention the permanent homes promised them within two years? The answer is: Not any time soon.

A big part of the reason is that the government in Jakarta, 1,700 km away, has been slow to allocate money while promised international aid has been held up as Indonesia created a reconstruction agency to manage cash inflows.

The people in the camps, meanwhile, are being cared for by a veritable Noah's Ark of aid groups that have set up shop in a land that looks like it's been through a nuclear holocaust.

'Callousness' of bureaucrats

The UN's Children's Fund, UNICEF, provides clean water and sanitation, Care International gives out water jugs, the World Food Program and private aid group World Vision distribute rice and cooking oil.

The chairman of Aceh's Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency is shocked and dismayed at what he sees as the callousness of Indonesia's bureaucrats.

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, in the job for just over a week, told Reuters in Banda Aceh he had found no sense of urgency in disbursing the 6 trillion rupiah ($613 million) earmarked in the government's 2005 budget for tsunami rebuilding. The money is not expected until September.

"It's shocking. Very limited things have been done for the poor people," he later told a group of foreign reporters in Jakarta after spending several days in Aceh for a first-hand look at the monumental task he faces.

Kuntoro, whose house in Banda Aceh was donated by the United Nations, said he will rely on the generosity of international aid groups, including $600 million from the International Red Cross, to begin rebuilding the province.

Aid donors pitched in $700 million in the initial weeks after the Dec. 26 quake and tsunami, financing most of the emergency relief operations in the first three months. Indonesia is expecting a total of more than $3.1 billion in foreign aid for tsunami relief and reconstruction.

"It's absolutely extraordinary he can't get any money until September," said Imogen Wall, a UN spokeswoman. "We share his frustration. We need someone like him."

Nearly 600,000 people were displaced after the magnitude 9 earthquake, the strongest in 45 years, unleashed an unprecedented tsunami that is feared to have killed 160,000 people in northern Sumatra.

According to preliminary data compiled so far by the United Nations and obtained by Reuters, 187,625 people are living in tent camps, 108,833 are living with friends and relatives, and just 69,930 are living in the crude wooden barracks the government has built.

Overall, the government has said there are nearly 600,000 homeless.

Domestic violence

Each of the displaced receives 12 kg of rice and 170 g of cooking oil a month. Anything more they must pay for themselves. Aid groups enlist those willing to help in the Herculean clean-up tasks at around $3.75 a day.

"I'm a dentist," said Safri. "They say practice here [in the camp] but I have no tools, no medicines. How? When it rains, everything gets wet. When the wind is strong, the tents fall down," said Sulaiman, another camp resident.

While basic needs are being met, aid workers worry about the mental health of people in the camps, where tsunami trauma is still raw. "That's a big concern," said UNICEF spokeswoman Lely Djuhari. "Because you have so many people living so close together, it could exacerbate the conditions for domestic violence."

Policewomen have been stationed in some of the camps to cope with the rising incidents of domestic abuse, she said.

The barracks are a little better, but unlike the tent camps, which sprang up on the ruins of villages, the barracks are located far from schools, markets and mosques.

"Food is most difficult," said M. Saleh, 51, who lost a shrimp farm in the tsunami and stays at the Lambaro barracks outside Banda Aceh with his seven children.

Children usually have to walk 2 km to school if they don't have the 2,000 rupiah a day bus fare. "There is no help, no money from the government," he said.