One year on, tsunami survivors remember...and rebuild<\/p>\n
Bill Tarrant
\nReuters\/Banda Aceh<\/p>\n
One moment Sartinah Fatar is painting her lovely new traditional
\nAcehnese house, chattering happily to her husband. The next she's
\nin tears recalling the day the sea roared in and snatched away
\nher mother and two children.<\/p>\n
Remember. Rebuild. It's the slogan of the Indonesian
\nreconstruction agency, set up after the Dec. 26 tsunami killed
\n231,452 people around the Indian Ocean rim, most of them in Aceh.
\nSartinah and hundreds of thousands of other tsunami survivors are
\ndoing plenty of both as the anniversary of one of nature's most
\nferocious episodes approaches on Dec. 26.<\/p>\n
Sartinah's family is one of the lucky few that have a new
\nhome. More than 1.5 million people are still living in tattered
\ntent camps, military-style barracks or crammed in with relatives
\nin Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.<\/p>\n
Even the dead cry out for better shelter.<\/p>\n
Near Sartinah's house in Kampong Java, a fishing community in
\nBanda Aceh, is a crude hand-painted sign. "This is a mass grave,"
\nit says. "Don't throw garbage on our mortal remains and soul.
\nAllah has called us. Let us rest in peace."<\/p>\n
Indeed, for two miles into Banda Aceh the tsunami erased
\neverything, leaving a bleak landscape of cement and tile
\nfoundations that resemble big burial slabs in a vast graveyard.<\/p>\n
A quarter of Kampong Java's population of 5,000 survived the
\n9.15 earthquake, the strongest in 40 years, and the series of
\ntsunami waves it spawned.<\/p>\n
Asking forgiveness<\/p>\n
Sartinah's family was eating breakfast when the quake rattled
\nthe dishes off the table. They ran outside, joining others who
\nwere racing in from the beach shouting "the water is coming".<\/p>\n
She ran with her husband to the elementary school next door,
\nher 8-year-old daughter close on her heels and her 18-year-old
\nson helping his frail grandmother.<\/p>\n
Sartinah was about to haul herself onto the roof of the school
\nwhen the waves, taller than the palm trees in the yard and
\ntravelling faster than a train, slammed into her.<\/p>\n
She never saw her daughter, son and mother again.<\/p>\n
"I was hanging onto the roof and thinking I never had a chance
\nto ask for my mother's forgiveness," Sartinah said, the tears
\nflowing down her cheeks. "As a Muslim you have to ask
\nforgiveness. If your mother doesn't forgive you, you can't go to
\nheaven."<\/p>\n
The disaster of biblical proportions drew a veritable Noah's
\nArk of faith-based groups to the tsunami region, including Muslim
\nAid, which is building 172 traditional Acehnese homes in Kampong
\nJava. Some survivors wondered why God had unleased such terrible
\nfury on their communities<\/p>\n
Overall, the international community raised more than $11
\nbillion, "the most generous and most immediately funded
\ninternational emergency relief effort ever", U.N. emergency
\ncoordinator Jan Egeland said.<\/p>\n
Muslim Aid took its design for panggung houses to the
\nsurviving residents of Kampong Java and allowed them to customise
\nthe design to their own needs,<\/p>\n
The result was a 48-sq-metre (516 sq ft) three-room, quake-
\nresistant home on thick timber stilts, with concrete walls, a
\ncorrugated roof and front verandah.<\/p>\n
"All the homes look different, so it doesn't look like a
\nCouncil housing project," said H. Fadlullah Wilmot, Muslim Aid's
\ncountry director in Indonesia.<\/p>\n
The donor community has pushed for community involvement in
\nthe $10 billion reconstruction effort in the main tsunami
\naffected countries, one of the reasons home rebuilding has gone
\nso slowly, Oxfam International said in a report on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
"'Do it quick, but do it with communities' was the motto when
\nworking on shelter throughout the tsunami zone," it said.<\/p>\n
Bureaucratic problems in acquiring land, unclear government
\npolicies and aid agencies' lack of expertise in building shelters
\nalso contributed to delays.<\/p>\n
Wreckage in minds<\/p>\n
Only 15 percent of the 308,000 homes that need to be built in
\ntsunami affected countries have been completed or under
\nconstruction, according to government data.<\/p>\n
While the physical debris has largely been cleared from
\ncoastal communities, health workers worry about the wreckage in
\npeoples' minds.<\/p>\n
The tsunami pulverised entire communities and slaughtered its
\ninhabitants. The monster waves left thousands of orphans,
\n"bachelor towns", women bereft of children and the compounded
\ngrief from multiple deaths in families in its awful wake.<\/p>\n
A year ago, women outnumbered men in Aceh. A long-running
\nseparatist rebellion had thinned the ranks of possible grooms.
\nbut the tsunami killed up to 75 percent of the women in coastal
\ncommunities of Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka and now thousands
\nof widowers are looking for brides.<\/p>\n
An Oxfam report in March said women were slowed by the
\nchildren they carried and were less likely to know how to swim.
\nMen, on the other hand, were out on boats, running errands, or
\nworking further inland in fields or hills.<\/p>\n
Some women still cling to an irrational hope their children
\nare alive; others are undergoing reversals of tubal ligations to
\ntry and have babies again.<\/p>\n
Aid groups such as New York-based International Rescue
\nCommittee have set up "child friendly spaces" to help heal the
\npsychic wounds of the young and most vulnerable.<\/p>\n
About a fifth of Aceh's children are suffering at least slight
\ntrauma requiring intervention, said Sonny Irwan, an IRC programme
\ncoordinator for Cot village down the coast from Kampong Java.
\nThere, kindergarten children draw pictures, play on swings -- and
\nsing songs with incredible gusto.<\/p>\n
Through these forms of expression they can draw on their own
\ninner strengths and heal, he said<\/p>\n
"In the beginning, they just drew pictures of the tsunami,"
\nIrwan said. "Now the pictures are of normal families with the sun
\nand the sky."<\/p>\n
REUTERS<\/p>\n
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