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A second wave of despair hits Aceh

Source
South China Morning Post - October 30, 2005

Simon Parry – Her shattered village was one of the most enduring images of the tsunami. Now, 10 months after the horror, Marini Hermansyah cradles her baby daughter in a mosquito-infested camp where survivors fear that the world has forgotten them.

"I am so worried for my baby girl," said Marini, 23, in the 3-metre-wide tent where daughter Nabila was born just over a month ago. "The rainy season is starting and it is not healthy for her to live in a tent."

Marini, newly pregnant when her husband drove her from their home to a hillside to escape the December 26 tsunami, said: "Afterwards, all the aid agencies came here. They promised to build us a home but then they went away again. They haven't done anything."

Eighty per cent of the 5,000 people in the village of Lampuuk died under a wall of water when the tsunami at its most ferocious – just 160km from the earthquake epicentre – pulverised their homes on the northern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Only the mosque remained, and the sight of it standing alone in a black tide of debris, mud and submerged bodies testified to the sheer scale of the disaster. It was an image that moved millions to pity, and helped generate billions of dollars in aid donations.

Today, however, Marini and tens of thousands of others in the area hit first and hardest by the tsunami are in tent camps, surviving on rations of rice and living on their nerves as earthquakes and aftershocks continue to rattle the traumatised coastline.

The camp where Marini lives with her husband and baby sits in a coconut grove and heavy husks rain down on the tents with every tremor. Her husband Abdullah, 26, said: "It is not good for us here. There is no clinic, no medicine and no nurse. The emergency response after the tsunami was good, but now nothing is happening. I am afraid we will live in this tent with our baby for another year – maybe longer. We just don't know."

An estimated 185,000 homes are needed to rehouse the people of Aceh province, where 100,000 died in the tsunami. Despite the unprecedented international response, barely one in 12 of those homes will have been built by the first anniversary of the tsunami on December 26.

Only around 4,000 homes had been completed by last month, according to United Nations estimates. By the end of the year, 15,000 at most will be standing, depending on how many delays the rainy season causes.

More than 60,000 people are meanwhile reduced to living in tents in increasingly difficult conditions while 60,000 more are in barracks or temporary housing and 290,000 are living with friends or relatives.

Red tape, rivalries between competing aid agencies, disputes over land rights and shortages of labour and materials have combined to cause chronic delays in the rebuilding programme, and survivors are growing weary of broken promises.

A report commissioned by the International Federation of the Red Cross said competition between aid agencies had led to a misallocation of resources and accused the United Nations of failing to co-ordinate the rescue operation effectively.

One of Marini's neighbours in the camp near Lampuuk is Mohammad Syamsi, 53, a marine engineer who came home from the sea to find his wife and four of his five children dead. He said bitterly: "The government and the aid agencies, they do nothing. They just drive past in their big cars. We have read in the newspapers how many people all over the world gave millions and millions of dollars to help us, but we haven't seen any of the money.

"We ask for help but nothing happens. The aid agencies promise us homes but at the end of each day we wait – we always wait. Oxfam came here and made a toilet and gave us some water. Now they never come."

As the rainy season sets in and the tents handed out to refugees at the beginning of the year start to mould and rot, conditions in the crowded camp of 300 survivors are worsening by the day.

"Every time it rains, the tents get flooded," Mohammad said. "We get food but only rice and canned fish. We have to pay for any medical care and people have no money. A pregnant woman and her baby both died here two months ago. The mother was too weak to survive and too poor to pay a doctor." As we leave his tent, Mohammad grabs my arm and says: "Tell the people to help us. Tell them to send money, but don't send it to the aid agencies. Send it to the people."

The reality is that there is already aid money in Banda Aceh, and lots of it. Eight kilometres from Mohammed's tent, in the centre of the bustling provincial capital, 86 international aid agencies have budgets running to tens of millions of dollars to provide tsunami victims with new homes. The problem is the speed at which it is being spent. The sight of aid workers being driven around in Land Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers is testing the patience of some of the tsunami victims.

A growing crisis has emerged because most aid agencies focused on providing emergency aid and then building permanent homes, rather than providing any medium-term temporary homes. Tents were handed out, survivor camps established and then the process of drawing up plans for permanent homes began.

But the approval process has been agonisingly slow. As it dragged on, the conditions of the camps have deteriorated, but little has been done to provide better shelter for the survivors who wait and wait.

In a country renowned for corruption and red tape, it took nearly nine months of negotiation just for the government and the aid agencies to agree to a building code setting out the standard measurements and requirements for new homes.

The United Nations acknowledges that conditions inside the tent camps are "unacceptable" and "intolerable". Survivors are in some cases living in worse conditions now than in the months immediately after the tsunami. Alarmed at the lack of progress, the UN has amended its policy and says it will urgently provide up to 20,000 temporary-shelter units for people living in tents, but even those will provide shelter for only a fraction of those currently sleeping in muddy camp sites.

Many survivors, frustrated at the failure of the international community to put roofs over their heads, have abandoned the squalor of the tent camps to return to ruined villages, building ramshackle huts or living under canvas and lean-tos next to the foundations of their old brick homes.

Hundreds of families are drifting back to Lampuuk and setting up homes around the mosque that defied the tsunami – its name Rahmatullah means "a blessing from God". Among them is Mahdhan Musa, 34, who has started to build by himself a new house just 200 metres from the mosque after living in a tent.

"One of the aid agencies gave me some sheet metal for the roof but apart from that I have done everything myself. I wanted to come back. I want to go back to my own people and rebuild our village the same as it was before the tsunami."

More than 100 families have now trickled back to the ghostly wasteland surrounding the severely damaged mosque, where prayers are still said amid slabs of fallen masonry and beneath precariously buckled pillars.

As the imam calls the faithful to prayer, villagers wander out of ramshackle homes built of driftwood and tarpaulins and tramp across the tiled floors and twisted metal foundations that are all that remain of the once-prosperous seaside village.

Standing incongruously amid the desolation is a single bright pink brick house – a show home for a planned development of 1,000 homes by the Turkish Red Crescent. But they will offer no one shelter this rainy season because the first homes will not be completed until the spring.

Three kilometres away in his tent camp, Mohammad Syamsi has already abandoned hope of a home. His keenest wish now is to be reunited with the only remaining member of his family, his 11-year-old son who was so badly injured he had to be sent away to be cared for by relatives in a neighbouring province. "I haven't seen him since," said Mohammad.

"I can't afford to go there to see him, and the conditions here in this camp are so bad I cannot bring him here. Every night I think about my boy, and I cry."

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