Sian Powell, Mon Ikeun – It is damp, crowded and hot – a tatty canvas tent surrounded by mud and puddles and home to four adult Acehnese sisters and two children. More than 10 months after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami killed her husband and her first child, 30-year-old Agustini and her sisters still live under canvas in the crowded tent village of Mon Ikeun, west of the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.
Agustini was pregnant when the giant waves flattened her house. Her four-month-old son has never known his father, nor a house with a roof. The tragedy swamped Agustini's entire family. Her mother drowned, and her elder sister Lindawati lost her husband and her child.
Lindawati and Agustini stuck together, with their younger sisters Mulyanti and Nurlisa. In the days after the disaster, the women fled first to a school for shelter, then to a mosque, then to relatives and finally they were given a tent.
Lindawati's only surviving child, eight-year-old daughter Sukma Armuna, has adjusted to tent life, but the adults still find it difficult. "This is the living room, the bedroom, this is everything," says Lindawati, gesturing to the canvas shelter, which stretches over a single mattress and a double-bed sized platform, where the four women and the children sleep. "It's very crowded," her sisters chorus.
Despite the magnitude of their loss, and the struggle of their daily existence, the women remain undaunted. They have planted chillies and marigolds along the side of the tent, and they hope one day to be given a small house by the Indonesian Government or an aid organisation. When that may happen is the burning question.
Somewhere between 67,000 and 75,000 Acehnese still live in tents across the province, ranging in quality from bearable to execrable. Now the rains have begun and the critics' once-muted questions have got louder and louder.
Although the tsunami was a natural disaster of immense dimensions, is it acceptable that after 10 months only about 2000 permanent houses have been built?
As well as those in tents, a further 100,000 Acehnese have been housed in barracks that are often in a deplorable condition. Thousands more have given up waiting and built their own shacks, and a silent majority of about 250,000 are staying with relatives, friends or neighbours. The scale of the problem is immense, and the solutions extremely slow to get moving.
A health crisis is looming. Aceh escaped a major disease outbreak in the frantic weeks after the tsunami, but the health of the dispossessed has been run down by long months of hardship and squalor. Tents are often awash with dirty water. Primitive sanitation and an underlying level of malnourishment have magnified the problems.
UN under-secretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland said on a recent visit to Aceh that the housing efforts had to be accelerated. "People of course are frustrated here because it's gone too slow, and I understand," he told reporters. "It has gone too slow."
The director of the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR), Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, has been equally forthright, saying if there were still displaced people living in tents then "BRR is too slow".
The UN recovery co-ordinator for Aceh and Nias, Eric Morris, says more than 500,000 people lost their houses in Aceh, and another 90,000 in Nias, when a massive earthquake struck the North Sumatran island in March.
With disasters of such size, few useful comparisons can be made regarding the rate of progress. "The magnitude of the situation in Aceh is in a category of its own," he says.
Yet all agreed that something had to be done about the tent and shack-dwellers of Aceh, and Morris has overseen a plan to provide rapid temporary housing, perhaps more than 20,000 small "instant houses", funded by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
The plan is to rehouse all the tent-dwellers by March next year, replacing the shabby canvas with 20sq m "shelters", with raised floors and steel roofs. "That's the plan," Morris says, adding that action was essential to avert worse problems.
The plan is also to rehouse some of the many Acehnese now living in below-par barracks. Many of the barracks are "god-awful", Morris says, with substandard sanitation and water supplies. Support is needed, too, for the families who have had displaced people living with them since early January. "I've got to believe that 10 months afterwards there's got to be all sorts of strains there," he says.
The Mon Ikeun sisters stayed with relatives for a short while after the tsunami, but they soon found it wasn't a tenable situation. "They didn't have enough for themselves," Lindawati says.
These days, the sisters get by. Just. "I make donuts and sell them," Lindawati says. "It's enough to buy vegetables, but not meat or fish."
A younger sister, Mulyanti, earns a little money working for a local Aceh aid organisation, and the sisters' elderly father, who lives in the next-door tent, makes some cash working as a casual field labourer.
In Mon Ikeun, a crowded settlement of 112 tents and more than 400 men, women and children, the sisters deal with the same problems of unemployment and poverty as their neighbours. "Who knows? If I had some capital, I could do something," Lindawati says. "I can sew and embroider but I don't have a machine."
Eddy Purwanto, the BRR deputy for housing and infrastructure, says no one can say how many houses should have been built in Aceh by now. "What's the benchmark?" he says. "We're now picking up. Maybe it will be 5000 (houses) a month."