Elizabeth Stevens: Long road to recovery
10 July 2005
Six months after the tsunami, the hard-hit Indonesian province of Aceh is rebuilding - brick by brick, village by village.
10:16 PM CDT on Sunday, July 10, 2005
"It looks so much better," said the photographer, as our truck crawled along the rutted road from Banda Aceh, Indonesia, to the shore.
Disbelief left me speechless. Stretching off into the distance in every direction was a rubble-strewn plain, interrupted here and there by buildings that looked like they'd been pummeled repeatedly by a giant fist. It was a scene from the apocalypse, from Hiroshima or Dresden, and my mind rebelled at the thought that it could have been worse. Jim Holmes, the photographer who accompanied me to Indonesia last month, had last visited Banda Aceh before the bodies and heavy debris had been cleared away, so he had grounds for his cheery perspective. This time we were there to document Oxfam's tsunami relief work six months after the disaster. On our first day together, we traveled to the village of Alue Deah Baro.
The driver pulled over at a desolate spot, and I didn't immediately grasp that we had arrived. This was no village. There were none of the children, houses, goats or shady palm trees that define an Acehnese town – just rubble, a few half-constructed buildings, a handful of people laying a foundation.
It was with an effort that Siti, my guide, drew my attention away from the scenes of wreckage in the distance to bring the village site into focus. There was a poultry barn, half-built. A tiny cafe was selling food and drinks. The community center was almost complete. The men standing chest-deep in the water were gathering fish with new nets.
New boats were on the way, I learned, and over the next few months, Oxfam and an Indonesian aid agency will join forces with villagers to construct 140 houses here.
The palm sapling that flapped at my knee turned out to be one of 2,000 planted by members of the community. Fifty-thousand freshly planted mangrove saplings were scattered about in the tidal muck – a future source of shoreline protection, edible shellfish and wildlife habitat. (Pak Jhon, the village leader, pointed to an added benefit for tsunami survivors: "The mangroves will keep the ocean out of sight.")
In one of the many mind-bending shifts of perception I experienced that day, I realized that this sad-looking piece of land was on the verge of becoming a living, breathing village again, with children, houses, goats, palm trees and all.
There are pressing unmet needs in Aceh, many stemming from the fact that far too many people are still living in tents and emergency housing, prevented from moving to permanent sites by complications around land ownership.
The Indonesian government needs to make resolving land issues – in close consultation with the affected communities – its top reconstruction priority.
But in the two weeks that we traveled from village to village, our days were filled with visits to tsunami survivors who, with the help of tools, equipment and other support provided by aid agencies, are restoring their communities and their incomes. Tailors are sewing again, fishers are hauling in catches, bakeries are up and running with stoves that work. Cash-for-work programs are helping people restore paddy fields, roads and bridges.
And with incomes and activity come some benefits that are hard to measure: At a village gathering, a woman told me, "Before you helped us get back to work, we felt like chickens in a cage." Her companions nodded agreement. "When we stay at home with nothing to do, we just think about the tsunami," another said.
Jim's wide-angle lens can capture the sweep of the destruction, but the recovery is best conveyed in a thousand close-up shots. This stage of the reconstruction is a mosaic of small changes, each appearing insignificant against the backdrop of the devastation, but all contributing to the quiet transformation of Aceh.
