Clothes pile up on beach amid organization hitches
Clothes pile up on beach amid organization hitches
Huge mountains of soaking wet clothes have built up on the
beaches of a remote tsunami-hit Indonesian town, in a sign that
relief efforts were still struggling from coordination and
transport problems, military and aid workers said on Tuesday.
An AFP photographer visiting Calang, one of the most severely
damaged towns on the west coast of Aceh province, found four
large piles of clothes on the picturesque beach.
One mound, mixed with broken boxes of instant noodles,
resembled a pile of garbage that stretched for about 50 meters.
The clothes had spilled out of the large sack they arrived in.
The December 26 earthquake and tsunamis that killed more than
230,000 people in the Aceh region severed roads and left many
west coast communities like Calang isolated from the rest of the
province.
"It took me one night and one day to get here," said a woman
from Teunom district picking through the clothes. She had walked
all the way.
Indonesian soldiers shouted at dozens of people to stop them
from trying to reach another sack which had not yet split open.
"Better they bring these things to the needy in the refugee
camp," one displaced man told AFP.
Abdul Jabar, of the provincial social affairs department, told
AFP the used clothes were recently delivered to Calang by an
Indonesian group, Garansi, probably by helicopter.
The Calang area social affairs department, which would have
helped distribute the goods, was not functioning after the
disaster and needed help from other agencies, he said.
"For the moment, that is the Indonesian Military," Jabar said.
A soldier on duty at the beach said the military did not have
transportation to distribute the aid. They previously had an off-
road vehicle which helped, but it was no longer in the area,
another soldier said.
"Sometimes it happens, there is good will to help but a lack
of organization," an aid worker said.
He said that when Calang first became accessible to relief
workers after the disaster, many commodities arrived there amid a
"lack of infrastructure" and co-ordination.
"That's why there are still goods on the beach in Calang," he
said, optimistic that somebody would arrive to get the clothes to
the needy.
Inigo Alvarez, a spokesman for the World Food Program (WFP),
which delivers food to Calang, said: "It's difficult for the
agencies to organize distribution there."
WFP's local partner in Calang, the non-governmental
organization Action Contre La Faim, trucks food to the needy but
its vehicles can only penetrate a little way into the surrounding
countryside, Alvarez said.
The largest relief organization working in Aceh, WFP currently
had seven staff in Calang working out of a tent, Alvarez said.
ab-it/bjn/ag
Asia-quake-Indonesia-Calang
AFP
GetAFP 2.10 -- FEB 1, 2005 17:01:46