John Aglionby, Nusa – The community notice board in Nusa is conspicuously underemployed. There are no updates on reconstruction programmes and the only bulletin on livelihood is a dog-eared one from June. The only recent notice advertises monthly distribution of rice, cooking oil, noodles and sardines to those who lost their homes in December's tsunami. Nearby, on the wall of a barrack – as temporary accommodation has been dubbed – are five designs from which the refugees must choose their replacement homes.

But there are no details about when building might start on the 162 planned homes, let alone when Care International, the charity coordinating reconstruction, expects people to move in.

This paucity of progress is typical of the situation across the devastated Indonesian province of Aceh, where 132,000 people died in the Boxing Day tragedy and almost 500,000 are homeless. Reconstruction and recovery programmes have not stopped but there is an overriding atmosphere that the honeymoon, when aid agencies met almost all needs pretty rapidly, has ended.

For most people the future is at best uncertain and more usually bleak.

"I reckon about 10% [of the men] are in skilled work in town and others might have one or two days' work a week, if they're lucky," said Mohammed Yassin, who runs a village shop. "We're still alive because we're still getting rice. If we weren't getting rice there would be a very serious problem."

Exacerbating matters is the government's failure to pay the refugees their 90,000 rupiah (£5) monthly fish allowance. "We've only received three of the eight installments," said village chief Zainun Saad. "We've been promised the next before Eid al-Fitr [the festival at the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan], but nothing is certain."

There are some success stories. Nelly Nurila, whose bakery was wiped out in the tsunami, has just taken delivery of 21m rupiahs' worth of bread-making equipment from Bogasari, one of Indonesia's biggest flour mills.

Operating in the three remaining rooms of her otherwise destroyed house, Ms Nelly and her nine staff make 600 loaves a day. "We're making about one million rupiah a day in sales but I haven't calculated yet how much of that is profit," she said. "I'm just so glad to be working again."

The sewing cooperative, set up for 33 women by Mercy Corps, is also thriving, thanks to the tradition of buying new clothes to celebrate Eid al-fitr. "We're flat out at the moment," said cooperative leader Muliana Nazruddin. "But I'm sure it will slow down after Eid al-fitr."

Some farmers are starting to earn money from the chilli shrubs they planted a few months ago, but crops like cassava will not be ready to harvest for months. Most are suffering added stress because they missed the rice-planting season due to a damaged floodgate not having been repaired.

The scene at the floodgate, a mile from the village, is a snapshot of reconstruction across the province. The five rusty, twisted panels that once controlled the water flow stand forlornly at varying angles as people fish from the concrete supports and wade through the neighbouring flooded paddyfields hunting for crabs. Nobody from the public works ministry has come to assess the damage, and nobody in the ministry's Aceh office knew anything about it when contacted by the Guardian.

In stark contrast, less than 10 metres away, four men were putting the final touches to a new 4km-long pipe that will deliver fresh water to Nusa. "This is an international project," said Mohammad, one of the workers. "I think the Swiss, Italians and Germans paid for it."

Such government inertia extends to the district administrations. The World Bank recently surveyed 10 of the 12 districts affected by the tsunami and found all but two cut their 2005 capital expenditure budgets and raised spending on items such as wages, buildings and staff cars. Aceh Besar, the district in which Nusa lies, implemented the steepest cut, from 12% to 3% of total expenditure.

Both Care and Mercy Corps have looked at the gate and estimated it would be relatively easy to mend but have also realised that a quick fix would not necessarily solve the problem. "Repairing the infrastructure is the easy part," said Peter Stevenson, the head of Mercy Corps's Aceh office. "Assessing whether anything is still suitable considering the changing tidal flows [following the tsunami] and other geographical changes is another matter."

This end of the honeymoon atmosphere is partly due to many agencies postponing projects, such as housing, until they have completed the spatial plans for the village demanded by the government's Aceh reconstruction agency (BRR).

Nusa's housing construction is thus likely to be delayed for weeks.

When the Guardian visited the village in August a Care project manager said he thought it would start in September. Johan Kieft, an assistant country director, now says the plots should be staked out by the end of November. "The fact that we've put up pictures shows we're moving forward," he said.

Planning for how to handle the expected scrutiny around the first anniversary is diverting attention from most programmes. Nowhere is this more visible than at the BRR headquarters, where a noticeboard counts down the number of days until December 26. "It is to remind us we still have a lot to do before the anniversary," an official said.