Ellen Nakashima, Lamteungoh – With a flick of her henna-painted hand, the teenage bride adjusted her gold batik head scarf, opened her mouth and accepted a spoonful of cooked white rice from her beaming husband. Then, as tradition dictates, she returned the smile and fed a spoonful of wedding rice to him.
In a temporary wood house built amid the ruins of the world's worst natural disaster in decades, Saleha and Muliadi celebrated their marriage on Saturday. Theirs was the third in this village – all three in one week.
Four months after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal zones in a dozen countries, this fishing village in Aceh province, the worst hit of all areas, is struggling to restore the normal rhythms of life.
As in hundreds of other villages reduced to a fraction of their former populations, three to four times as many women and girls than men were killed in Lamteungoh. Many men in these coastal towns were fishermen who survived at sea or were farming in the hills when the tsunami hit on Dec. 26. But their wives and children were killed by the waves not far from the beach.
Unions such as that of Saleha, 18, and Muliadi, 24, are one sign of the survivors' determination to rebuild their lives and homes and renew their communities.
"It's a good omen. It's like spring," said a jovial village cleric, Marwadi, one of dozens of widowers who is seeking a new bride among a vastly reduced female population.
Here in villages near the provincial capital on the northern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia's northernmost major island where Aceh is located, the coastline is still strewn with debris. But the corpses have been mostly cleared, and tents, government-built barracks and temporary wood houses put up by private groups dot the mud-caked wasteland. People are returning to their villages, brushing aside fears of a repeat tsunami and beginning to rebuild where and what they can.
The Indonesian government last week announced a new agency to oversee reconstruction. A multi-donor trust fund was also set up to handle $500 million in grants, and international audit firms will work with the Indonesian government to try to ensure that the billions of dollars in aid pledged from public and private sources is spent as intended. US
officials say that given the scale of destruction, recovery work could not have proceeded any faster.
Many people, however, are not waiting for the central government to carry out its 12-volume, three-year master plan for reconstruction. The tension between the government's desire to rebuild cautiously and people's yearning for homes and jobs has been growing.
"I don't care about any blueprint," said Baharuddin, Lamteungoh's village chief, who had discussed rebuilding with a reporter two weeks after the tsunami, already eager to get to work. Last week, he said in an interview that he was still impatient. "If I have to wait for the central government, it will be a long time," he said.
In fact, Lamteungoh, with 250 people, showed early signs it was helping itself. Five days after the tsunami, the men began burying corpses – 500 by mid-February. In mid-January, they built a small community shelter.
That spirit impressed representatives of the US Agency for International Development, which has given the village $33,000 in project money, paying residents to clean the land and build a community center, volleyball court and garden. Uplink, a consortium of Indonesian and international development groups, provided materials for the 40 temporary homes.
Other groups donated, too. The Prosperous Justice Party, rooted in Islam, was the first group to help, providing a canoe and material for a small, temporary mosque. CARE International donated $1,500 worth of rice, toiletries, cooking oil and other goods. Pugar, an Indonesian group, is donating eight fishing boats that will arrive in June and financed a one-month program paying people about $4 a day to clean the village. Another Indonesian group supplied a generator and a motorbike.
The pace of reconstruction is uneven. A half-hour drive east of Lamteungoh, the fishing village of Lambada Lhok is building an ice factory, fish market and cooperative store with help from a French aid organization. The fishermen have returned to the sea in boats spared by the tsunami, hauling in tuna that they sell to buy gold jewelry for their prospective brides.
Other villages have not much more than some temporary wood houses and a token government stipend for residents of 30 cents a day.
Baharuddin and Marwadi did not attend Saleha's wedding because they were at a meeting organized by Uplink. There, they discussed plans to build 164 permanent houses made of steel-reinforced concrete to be finished by year's end. Uplink would provide the materials and technical advice.
At 2:30 p.m., Baharuddin's voice boomed over a village public address system. "Everybody to the rice field!" he commanded. Men brandished shovels and scythes, donned rubber boots and blue canvas hats, and trudged 100 yards toward the green hills behind the village. This was Day 1 of a 25-day USAID project to clean the village rice field, still littered with metal, wood and coconut tree trunks washed up by the tsunami.
Baharuddin, 49, took a shovel and began to retrieve bones from damaged graves to rebury them. "I believe their spirits will be at peace," he said.
He lost his wife, his parents and all five children in the tsunami, and is still grieving. A sun-bronzed, balding fisherman, he expresses his sorrow in poems. He has hung two on his wall. One is to his wife. "I am alone. Like a boat without a rudder, I am aimless. I would like to find someone to take your place. But I'm afraid that her heart will not be as good as yours."
Baharuddin is eager to repopulate his village. He offered money to buy three grams of gold for the first villager to get married. The money went to Muzibullah, 26, a fishmonger who before the tsunami barely knew Afnizar Munawar, 24. But in the emergency shelter, they bonded over the loss of parents and siblings. Afnizar cooked and cleaned for Muzibullah. "Day by day, we got closer," said the slim, pretty bride. A week ago Monday, they wed.
Time has brought other changes. Jarfandi M. Juned, 43, who in January asked Baharuddin for a letter to help him bring his buffalo to town, lost his animals but has opened a kiosk selling thick, sweet coffee. He has saved enough, he said, to find a bride. Fitriah, 26, a widow whose leg was badly injured, is now healed. She is considering a marriage proposal from a man in another village.
The men without wives live together now, as many as five to a house. The oldest in each group, seen as the nurturer, usually does the cooking and cleaning. They sleep side by side on wooden platforms, putting up with snores.
In some ways, Lamteungoh feels like a community again. The women decided on Friday to set up a school in a tent so their children would not have to travel an hour on a school bus. In the afternoon, a group of men played soccer in a rubble-strewn field. To cheer people up and distract himself, Baharuddin has built a Christo-like fence of plastic water bottles strung together, and covered the facade of his house with the bottles. Villagers call it the Aqua House.
But life has not returned to normal. "We feel like newcomers in our own home," said Fitriah. Every few hours a military truck passes, and soldiers in camouflage lean out, brandishing guns. Occasionally villagers hear the gunfire between the soldiers and separatist rebels, who live in the mountains.
The imbalance between the sexes has given women an advantage in the courting game. "It's woman power now," Baharuddin said. "It's up to the women to decide who they want."
On Saturday afternoon, two women were laughing about the competition for wives. One widow received five proposals, said Yeni, 32, a teacher who lost her husband and two children. She said she has had one proposal.
Unfortunately, her suitor asked two other women as well. "He even used the same words," she said, doubling over in mirth. "I told him why doesn't he just tape-record his proposal!"
Just then Marwadi, dressed in a crisp blue button-down shirt and gray slacks, walked up and sat on the bench near the women. They tried to hide their chortles. They didn't want the Lamteungoh Lothario to know they had had a chuckle at his expense.
After sundown, Baharuddin, Marwadi and 20 other men went to the house of Saleha's uncle, where Saleha had arranged plates of beef, shrimp, rice and deviled eggs on rugs on the floor. The men prayed. Then they ate what remained of the wedding feast.