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