Nick Gentle, Banda Aceh – In the streets surrounding Banda Aceh's grand mosque, the city's commercial heart is starting to beat again. The stunning white building stands about 2.5km inland, yet its minarets and domes bear the scars of the tsunami.
Opposite the mosque's gate, Mimi Lau – a 27-year-old ethnic Chinese Protestant born and raised in Banda Aceh – has been working to reopen her party-supplies shop for more than a month. "We've been cleaning the stock for more than three weeks now," she says, placing a freshly cleaned doll back on the shelf. "We had to throw 40 per cent of it away because it was ruined in the tsunami."
The yellow gloves worn by her five workers combine with the gaudy trinkets already arrayed on her shelves to add a splash of colour and life to this street, Jalan Cut Ali. Most of the buildings survived but many of their occupants did not.
"I used to work here with my father, but he was killed so now I have to run this store and three others on my own," Ms Lau says. Despite her losses, which she puts in the realm of 10 billion rupiah ($8.2 million), she is optimistic about the future. "People always need to have parties. Some of our regular customers are already ordering things, and as soon as this place is cleaned up we will fill their orders. "We will have a big party of our own when we reopen."
Elsewhere on the street, more and more shops are reopening. In one, a bookseller is drying the pages of moisture-swollen volumes; a brown stain extending two metres above the floor marks the height of the flood. A few doors away, a locksmith works to open a gold trader's safe, while street vendors hawk everything from fruit and vegetables to fried noodles and the latest top-selling VCDs. One of them, Tsunami Aceh, is a compilation of footage from the tsunami and its aftermath. "I want to be able to show my grandchildren what happened here," says one recent purchaser of the disc.
The traditional commercial area around the mosque is just starting to regain its vitality. Much of the trade it once enjoyed has moved south, settling in the areas that escaped destruction.
Traders in the Lamlagang area, once one of the city's minor market districts, are doing a roaring trade. It is mayhem in slow motion as people weave in and out of the stream of scooters, vans, dogs and relief-agency vehicles.
In backstreets, aid agencies have taken over mansions vacated by tenants who fled. The agencies are prepared to pay rents inflated by a shortage of accommodation and a huge influx of foreign cash.
But less than a kilometre away, a line crosses Banda Aceh, splitting it roughly across the middle. There is destruction on one side and normality on the other, there are those who have lost everything and those who have not, those working to rebuild and those who must wait.
Entering from the landward side to the south, Banda Aceh appears much like any Indonesian city. Rice paddies give way to stalls. They, in turn, give way to crowded marketplaces full of food, clothing, two-stroke scooters, miscellaneous shops and, most of all, people.
But enter it from the north, from the sea, and it looks like London after the blitz or Hiroshima after the bomb. From the coast looking in, there are lonely expanses of bare earth punctuated by the shells of gutted houses, an occasional palm tree and the fluttering of flags set up by survivors to mark the sites of their former homes. There are few people to be seen.
But they can be found. Here and there, people are returning to places they last saw on the morning of December 26; places where only memories survive.
"I was here in the village and I saw the wave coming, so I [fled] on my motorbike," says 32-year-old fisherman Hasbi. He stands amid the ruins of Alue Deah Teungoh, a shrimp-farming community on Banda Aceh's seafront where three-quarters of the population, including his wife, daughter and parents, died that morning. "The water missed me by about 200 metres, but my family was destroyed," he says.
Hasbi has just returned with a group of other survivors from the neighbourhood, to plant mangrove seedlings along a waterfront drastically reshaped by the tsunami, which killed up to 60,000 people in Banda Aceh alone. "This was a beautiful place," he says, gazing out across a body of brackish water that used to contain sheltered shrimp ponds and mangrove beds. Now it is open to the sea, and home to nothing more than splintered trees.
"This was my base. It was close to the water – close to the fishing - and I also used to sell clothes and shoes to make a little more money for my family. Now I have nothing," he says. "I just want to be able to move back here and start again."
The site is barren but Hasbi is moving back to the village along with all but one of the other 382 residents who survived out of a population of 1,520. They intend to rebuild, with funds from a collective savings account and support from Oxfam.
Their story is one being played out in varying ways across Banda Aceh. Throughout the disaster zone, people are putting December 26 behind them and trying to rebuild what they can of their lives.
The other side of the line might have escaped the tsunami, but collapsed buildings dot the landscape. They are silent reminders that the city was also hit hard by the magnitude 9.3 earthquake that spawned Boxing Day's deadly waves, and whose aftershocks still rock Banda Aceh on a regular basis. It is in the shadow of one such toppled building that the children of Primary School No33 spend their lunch hour.
The school lost three teachers and eight students, but was able to reopen exactly one month after the disaster. They rebuilt with a little help from the government and the United Nations' children's organisation, Unicef, to replace damaged materials.
Year-six student Surya Darma is one of 20 children sent to attend classes there after their own schools were destroyed. "School is the same as always – it is safe. It's all right, but some things are a bit strange... like that building," the 13-year-old says, gesturing towards a crumpled pile of wreckage that looms over the playground. "Every now and then the workmen push a bit of it down and it crashes into the schoolyard."
But despite that, he says he is settling in well. "I am happy to be at this school because I have made some new friends here. Some of my other friends died in the tsunami, but most of them are okay."
He adds that his father "drank some of the tsunami" and was very sick for a while, but has recovered and is back living with his family in a shop they rented after their home was washed away.
But while Darma's family survived and has the capacity to rent suitable accommodation, others are not as well off.
In the verdant hills behind Banda Aceh, 45-year-old housewife Ramleh is watching a team of workers erect a set of crude barracks made of timber and corrugated iron.
She lost 180 of her extended family in the disaster, and currently shares a couple of tents in a nearby camp for displaced people with the remaining 10 members of her family. "I don't really know if these barracks are for us," she says. "We have to wait for information from the government."
Ramleh is one of about 139,000 people from the greater Banda Aceh area currently living in camps dotted throughout the city and its immediate surrounds. Most of them have lost close to everything, and are resigned to waiting in temporary housing for their homes to be rebuilt – preferably in their original locations.
"I have marked out where my land is, but we need some [clearer notice] from the government about when we will be allowed to live there again," she says.
She is anxious to return to her community of Lampuuk – 15 minutes' drive from the centre of Banda Aceh – where the tsunami left nothing standing except its mosque. It is perhaps the ultimate contradiction that, in this place where so many of their family and friends were taken away by what is seen as an act of God, people like Ramleh take the survival of the mosques as a sign He will still come to their aid. "I want to move back – it is beautiful there – but it is in God's hands," she says.
This unshakeable faith is something that Aceh's acting governor, Azwar Abubakar, is counting on to be a key driver of recovery. So strong is Islam in the province that Aceh is sometimes referred to as the verandah of Mecca, or serambi Mekah in Bahasa Indonesian.
"We believe that this was a test – an examination from Allah," Mr Azwar says. "An examination through a little fear, a little hunger, the loss of property, the loss of souls and the failure of crops. He wants us to see that although our treasures are gone, our souls remain."
The religious rationalisation in Aceh goes like this – all the people lost in the disaster gained access to paradise because they died bringing God's message to the rest of the world.
This trust that the dead have gone to a better place explains to a large degree why people like Ramleh and Hasbi, and even the Protestant Ms Lau, show little grief when discussing their personal tragedies. Instead, they look to the future.
"It is up to those left behind to be kind and good and patient, so they can follow their loved ones to heaven," Mr Azwar says. "If they are not, and they sit around complaining about everything, then they will lose their family, their treasure and their future.
"In just 15 minutes, He can take away 250,000 souls. It seemed as though we were all worthless to Him. But on the other hand, those that are still alive will be able to recover and lead a normal life again because of the help of the global community.
"So this has also given people a real understanding of humanitarian values," he says. "And this has given them hope."