Aceh students mix school with grim body hunt

Aceh students mix school with grim body hunt

Cecil Morella, Agence France-Presse/Banda Aceh

Students returned to university in Aceh on Tuesday for the first time since the tsunami, to find carefree academia replaced by a grim timetable of lectures and corpse collection.

At Syiah Kuala University, the most prestigious college in the badly-hit province, scholars trickled back onto the leafy, sprawling campus, which officials say has lost 110 staff and 1,000 of its 23,000 students.

The state university was swamped by the waves that engulfed at least half the provincial capital Banda Aceh on Dec. 26 as mid- term examinations were underway.

With much of the future of the province now resting on the shoulders of the students, vice-rector for academic affairs Darni Daud, who lost 44 relatives in the disaster, said students would be encouraged not to dwell on the tragedy.

They should "forget what happened in the past so they will be able to look at the future", he said.

Maintaining a positive attitude will be a challenge at the university, where signs of the catastrophe were unavoidable.

Syiah Kuala's imposing buildings suffered cracks due to the magnitude 9.0 earthquake which triggered the waves. Its economics college incurred massive water damage and some laboratory equipment and furniture was broken.

But the biggest loss was the toll on its faculty, prompting the school to appeal for help from the national government and other universities to help replace senior teaching staff.

"Many of the lecturers and administrative staff right now do not have a place to stay. So they stay anywhere they can. Some rent places outside the city and some of them even stay in camps," Daud said.

The grounds of the campus are also filled with tent camps, both for families displaced by the tsunamis and for Red Cross volunteers. Some displaced people sleep in classrooms.

Daud said the tents would be allowed to remain but those living inside faculty buildings would be encouraged to move.

Iwan Do'a Sempena, a 21 year-old majoring in religious studies, arrived at college Tuesday in the same clothes he has worn for the past five weeks -- a blue blazer bearing the icon of the Indonesian branch of the Red Cross.

His first task was to get an anti-tetanus shot to ward off the disease which has begun to appear among some of those injured by the tsunami.

The sunburnt youth is among about 40 students who have volunteered for Red Cross cadaver recovery teams despite having lost his house to the waves.

For several weeks the student volunteers have combed districts of Banda Aceh seven days a week to collect and dispose of corpses which are daily still being found by the hundreds.

"This might go on for two or three more months," Sempena told AFP. "After I finish my school work in the afternoon, I will go and get the bodies."

Daud said regular classes would resume in two weeks' time but the university might give a "special consideration" -- handing out passing marks to all the surviving students for the current term so they would not face problems registering in the next semester.