Gritty Survivors of Banda Aceh Slowly Getting Back on Their Feet

BANDA ACEH, INDONESIA (10 March 2005) - Six weeks after the tsunami, Idris, a retired civil servant, and his wife Cut Rosmiati are rebuilding their two-storey house in Lampulo, a residential suburb that the tsunami of last December reduced to rubble.

Standing in the shell that was once their living room, Idris says they are "stressed" and still struggling to come to terms with the loss of their only child, Asri.

"I was upstairs when the wave came," says Idris. "My wife and son were outside with grandmother."

The torrent blew out the front wall and carried away Cut Rosmiati for about two kilometers. But she survived, while their son and grandmother did not.

A man trundles by with a wheelbarrow and Idris turns to supervise the task of restoring a shattered life.

Perched atop two houses across the street is a boat that saved the lives of people who climbed aboard during the raging flood.

The incongruity of the scene is commonplace in a city where a powerful earthquake, followed by a devastating tsunami, brutally ended the lives of tens of thousands and left most survivors with little except their memories.

Close by, amid a desert of debris, two women are busy scrubbing clothes on a concrete slab, indifferent to the bulldozers scooping up the foul smelling black detritus around them.

Heartbreak and hope sit side by side in this city of broken buildings and gritty spirit.

Like green buds poking through the rubble, people emerge with shovels and brooms, nails and hammers, to clean up the mess and start rebuilding.

From doorways, mothers with children in their arms invite a visitor to take their photograph. They want a witness that they survived nature's holocaust.

Trucks kick up dust as they rumble down on the main street, hauling cement, timber and other construction materials. "For the first weeks, there was an outflow of people. Now they are coming back," says Nigel Landon, an ADB consultant engineer and one of only a handful of expatriates living in Banda Aceh before the tsunami.

Because of the long-running conflict between the government and separatists, Aceh was generally off limits to visitors, but the influx of dozens of relief and development agencies has swollen the foreign presence.

Since news of the tsunami began breaking on 26 December 2004, ADB - which has several ongoing projects in Aceh - has been working on providing both quick-disbursing assistance and longer-term rehabilitation projects.

"Staff came back from leave and the team has basically been working flat out ever since," says David Green, country director at ADB's Indonesia Resident Mission (IRM) in Jakarta.

Together with the government and other development partners, ADB helped prepare the damage and loss assessment that estimates reconstruction will need $1.5 billion in 2005 and up to $5 billion over the next five years.

ADB quickly mobilized funds of around $65 million from existing projects and is preparing a large emergency package of grant assistance from its ADB Asian Tsunami Fund.

"We are fortunate that we have ongoing projects in Aceh, in agriculture and infrastructure as well as the social sectors, so we have people and systems on the ground," says Mr. Green. "This puts us in a position to mobilize funds and put them to use pretty quickly."

So responsive has the international community been that some analysts believe the issues of relief and rehabilitation are less to do with the volume of aid but whether funds are used properly and appropriately.

"Indonesia is already grappling with weak governance," says Mr. Green. "And Aceh is at the extreme end in capacity on this issue."

To help strengthen Indonesia's financial management of tsunami funds, ADB is expanding a recently approved state audit reform project to include Aceh.

Aid appropriateness is an issue that concerns Jean-Marie Lacombe, ADB's head of portfolio management in Indonesia.

"We need to remember that Indonesians live with volcanoes and earthquakes and their understanding of nature and disaster is different from the western view," he says. "We should be careful that aid is proportionate with the people's resilience and capacity to recover."

He also frets that other provinces with high poverty rates are watching grant assistance flowing to Aceh with concern. "They wonder when it might be their turn to receive grants," says Mr. Lacombe. "They also have enormous needs in their health and education sectors, for example."

In Banda Aceh, a long-time resident worries about the impact of abundant free food and drinking water on the local economy.

"Will this mean the local water bottler goes out of business or that the farmers on the east coast cannot sell their goods in the market?" he asks.

In the end, Banda Aceh's recovery lies with people like Hafidh Hussein, a 27-year-old local businessman.

The tsunami stopped a few hundred meters from his home, but Hafidh lost a sister - and his business after four rented shops were heavily damaged and their contents washed away.

On the day of the disaster, Hafidh rushed between looking after his wife Ivana Dewi, pregnant with their first child, searching for relatives on his motorbike, and helping to rescue people from a nearby river.

After the tsunami, Hafidh and his wife moved in with relatives out of town, but they returned after three weeks to rebuild their lives.

Hospitalized briefly for exhaustion, he says, "I still have a burning feeling in my stomach and I feel dizzy and I cannot see too well. But what choice do we have? I will look for some bank credit to start again."

About ADB