Bill Tarrant, Lampuuk – Juwaria hammers away at cement rubble, extracting iron rods she will sell to buy food, oblivious that her tsunami-flattened village is benefiting from an aid windfall.
Many foreign visitors have come to Lampuuk – including former US presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton – and a variety of aid workers have left their banners in the town, where more than four out of every five people died in the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami.
But almost five months after the disaster, the village with a population of 6,500 before the tsunami hit is still a sea of rubble.
Bush and Clinton raised $10 million at a Houston, Texas fundraiser on May 6 for projects in four countries swamped by the monster waves that are feared to have killed 228,000 people around the region, including 160,000 in Indonesia. Some of the money is earmarked for Lampuuk, a coastal town just outside Aceh's provincial capital, Banda Aceh.
"Oh, we didn't know about this," village chief and rice farmer Hamdan Hasyen, 40, told Reuters. "We're happy to hear that. Hopefully, they'll come again and stay with us so they can see the situation here," he said, adding that Lampuuk had renamed its main street "Bill Clinton George Bush Road."
Lampuuk is known as the place where the tsunami traveled the furthest inland – some 7 km until it smacked into steep hillsides that show wave marks 10 meters high. The only building left standing was a two-storey mosque, which now can be seen from miles away.
About 250 of the village's survivors live in tattered UN tents that regularly collapse now the western monsoon has set in. The rest live in army-style barracks. They draw power from a 1,500-watt generator and water from a huge tank donated by Oxfam.
Money from the Bush-Clinton fundraiser will be used to rebuild a school, a health clinic, women's center and a small market as well as repair the water system in Lampuuk, which the two ex-presidents visited on Feb. 20. It will also pay for some scholarships to universities in Texas and Arkansas.
Food aid stopped
That all seems a little distant to people who are struggling to survive. Hasyen and others in the town say nobody has given them food aid since the end of February.
The World Food Program, which is distributing 10,000 tonnes of food a month to nearly 600,000 displaced people in Aceh, concedes that Lampuuk is missing out.
CARE, one of the groups distributing WFP commodities, had determined that the people living in Lampuuk's tent camp were getting food from another aid group and decided to stop deliveries, a WFP official in Banda Aceh told Reuters.
Hasyen insists that this is not the case and points to a white board on the Rahamatullah mosque showing a list of NGO activities, none of which involve food distribution.
The WFP said it would send a team to the village to investigate the situation.
The group's emergency coordinator, Charlie Higgins, said WFP stopped distributing food when it determined recipients had an independent source of livelihood and no longer need relief.
"If people have an income, it's counterproductive to give out aid. We're considering how to do that in certain areas."
The overall situation in Lampuuk illustrates a central dilemma in the Aceh aid effort. While the government has declared the emergency phase of the disaster over, and foreign aid groups are poised to begin rehabilitation work, hundreds of thousands of people are still struggling to survive day to day.
Iron scraps
Many Lampuuk residents now comb the rubble for concrete reinforcing rods they will sell to a scrap dealer. Although they wear USAID gloves and galoshes with shirts that read "Cleaning up Equals Prosperity," very little cleaning up is being done.
Juwaria, 48, says she can salvage abut 30 kg of iron rods a day, or about 24,000 rupiah ($2.50) worth. "I'm selling the iron for food." Hasyen says Lampuuk has enough equipment for only 50 people to work in the clean-up crews.
"The rest are out looking for iron to get money for food, to get petrol for the generator and stuff."
Rehabilitation work is progressing in Lampuuk, although the natural elements are still the worst of enemies.
Oxfam erected frames for a couple of model temporary homes before they were blown down in a windstorm this week. It is also helping to restore paddy fields.
German Agro Asia is planting mango tree gardens and working to counter the elements by sowing pine saplings to create a windbreak on the beach.