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Bitter Harvest at Ground Zero
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LEUPUNG, INDONESIA
Samidan is headman of a village that exists in name only, but he is still carrying out his responsibilities. Around 8 am on 26 December 2004, a calm sea suddenly rose up and swallowed his village of Meunasah Masjid in Leupung district, along with more than 80% of its inhabitants.
Samidan escaped because he was in Banda Aceh, but he lost 35 members of his extended family, including his wife and child.
"Most of the people we met want to go back to their original village and start cultivation again as soon as possible"
A calm man, Samidan has chosen to remain in this barren landscape, occupying a tent beside the remnants of a small mosque a few meters from the sea.
“Every day, I return to the village to bury more of the dead,” he says, waving a desultory hand at the flies swarming around.
He wants to stay and help clear the land and, eventually, rebuild his village, he says, unfazed by the magnitude of the task.
This was never easy farming land—in fact, it was part of an Asian Development Bank (ADB) irrigated agriculture project to boost productivity.
But today this is ground zero—a vast expanse of rubble between the sea and the hills, flat apart from the odd foundation stone and stubs of coconut palms. The main people around are masked Indonesian soldiers looking for dead bodies.
“The tsunami destroyed the bunds (small dikes marking the field boundaries) as well as the secondary and tertiary irrigation canals,” says Nigel Landon, a consultant engineer working on ADB’s Northern Sumatra Irrigated Agriculture Sector Project. “The land needs to be cleared and the bunds and canals restored. In addition, a layer of sand covers the top soil, in some places up to 30 centimeters.”
ADB is ready to reprogram up to $1 million under the project for a topographical survey of affected areas. In addition, ADB is proposing substantial new grant funding from its Asian Tsunami Fund to rehabilitate damaged irrigation systems.
Many tsunami survivors are staying at a nearby refugee camp—an oasis in a barren desert—and not surprisingly they are not too happy with the conditions, although food and water are provided.
Women, such as Syukriah, aged 31, from Lamsenia village, for example, have to do their washing on a narrow road, with vehicles passing close by.
Syukriah was in Banda Aceh when the tsunami hit and says she is one of about 10 women and 40 men to survive of a population of 1,700. She lost 12 family members, including her husband and a child. The only consolation is that her 14-year-old son survived after clinging to a tree. Despite the haunting memories, Syukriah wants to return home even though nothing is left.
“Most of the people we met want to go back to their original village and start cultivation again as soon as possible,” says Tetsuro Miyazato, an ADB Senior Water Resources Specialist who visited the area in late February.
There is, however, another problem for bringing villages back to life: the small proportion—around 10% in some villages— of survivors.
As one ADB consultant asked, “How are you going to revive villages without people?”
Others, however, say that extended families are expected to address this gap. There remains the issue as to what to do with land cultivated by people who perished in the disaster.
“We are told that paddy land without ownership will be donated to the mosque, which will decide how to allocate it, possibly giving it to the poor people in the village,” says Mr. Miyazato.
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