Multa Fidrus, Banten – Aisyah looks out from her oceanfront bamboo hut at the submerged concrete foundations of her family home in Karang Serang village, Tangerang regency.
The food stall owner said that nine years ago the house, which was located on a 2,000-square-meter block of land, was situated about a kilometer from the coastline. She inherited it from her parents.
The mother of three is just one of many residents living on the regency's north coast whose homes succumbed to erosion. Aisyah and the other people who were left homeless now occupy a soccer field that belongs to the village administration.
When The Jakarta Post visited her in September, Aisyah and her three children were eating their lunch on a bamboo bench in front of the hut enjoying the sea breeze. The hut was within 10 meters of the shoreline.
In mid-December, when the Post made a second visit, Aisyah and her children were busy wrapping up their things in old cloth. The erosion had shifted a little further inland and Aisyah was consequently moving her house 10 m away from the old location.
Her youngest daughter, 18-year-old Anisah, was sound asleep on the bench amid the bundles of things and kitchen appliances, ignoring the waves sweeping materials from along the shore and the sound of the waves crashing on the sand.
The administration had recently built a 50-meter-long rock wall, called a "wave bumper", to halt erosion in the area. But apparently it was not erected in the right position as many of their homes remained unprotected.
Concrete rubble is the only sign there were once houses in the area. Hundreds of hectares of fish ponds, shrimp farms and rice fields that once existed in the coastal villages of Ketapan, Karang Serang, Tanjung Anom and Marga Mulya were also washed away.
Waves and high winds damaged the shoreline bit by bit, a condition that was worsened by illegal and indiscriminate sand mining from the beach, carried out by people from outside the area.
"The sand mine was run by people who obviously had a lot of money at their disposal. They hired trucks and employed many people to take the sand at night, when we were off guard. They only stopped because we threatened them physically," Aisyah said, adding that sooner or later the village would be engulfed by the sea.
Even after the "outsiders" had left, however, some residents who had previously made a living as fishermen or shrimp farmers began operating the sand mine. They excavated the sand and loaded it onto waiting trucks, accepting money from the drivers.
"I only earn Rp 25,000 a day from sand mining. I used to be a fisherman, but I haven't been able to afford to take my boat out regularly since the fuel price increases in 2004," Sabarudin said.
To feed his wife and five children, Sabarudin said he had no other choice but to take sand from the beach, although he was aware the practice was causing irreparable damage to the coastal environment. "What else can I do? I have no other skills. I have no land to farm or capital with which to start a business," he said.
Village head Firdaus said he was powerless to stop the operation of the sand mine because he could not offer the workers other forms of employment. "Only the government has the power to do something," he said, adding that halting the operation of the mine would only cause more social and economic problems because most of the miners were village residents.
He said he had made several attempts to halt the mining, but gave up each time in the face of protests by villagers. "They rely on sand mining as their main source of income," said Firdaus, whose village has a population of 4,969.
Over the past 10 years, more than one-and-a-half kilometers of the coastline has been reclaimed by the sea. Natural forces will continue to erode the beach, resulting in significant losses for the people who live there. But without incentive to act, the local government will only ignore the problem.