One year on, tsunami survivors remember...and rebuild

One year on, tsunami survivors remember...and rebuild

Bill Tarrant, Reuters/Banda Aceh

One moment Sartinah Fatar is painting her lovely new traditional
Acehnese house, chattering happily to her husband. The next she's
in tears recalling the day the sea roared in and snatched away
her mother and two children.

Remember. Rebuild. It's the slogan of the Indonesian
reconstruction agency, set up after the Dec. 26 tsunami killed
231,452 people around the Indian Ocean rim, most of them in Aceh.
Sartinah and hundreds of thousands of other tsunami survivors are
doing plenty of both as the anniversary of one of nature's most
ferocious episodes approaches on Dec. 26.

Sartinah's family is one of the lucky few that have a new
home. More than 1.5 million people are still living in tattered
tent camps, military-style barracks or crammed in with relatives
in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Even the dead cry out for better shelter.

Near Sartinah's house in Kampong Java, a fishing community in
Banda Aceh, is a crude hand-painted sign. "This is a mass grave,"
it says. "Don't throw garbage on our mortal remains and soul.
Allah has called us. Let us rest in peace."

Indeed, for two miles into Banda Aceh the tsunami erased
everything, leaving a bleak landscape of cement and tile
foundations that resemble big burial slabs in a vast graveyard.

A quarter of Kampong Java's population of 5,000 survived the
9.15 earthquake, the strongest in 40 years, and the series of
tsunami waves it spawned.

Asking forgiveness

Sartinah's family was eating breakfast when the quake rattled
the dishes off the table. They ran outside, joining others who
were racing in from the beach shouting "the water is coming".

She ran with her husband to the elementary school next door,
her 8-year-old daughter close on her heels and her 18-year-old
son helping his frail grandmother.

Sartinah was about to haul herself onto the roof of the school
when the waves, taller than the palm trees in the yard and
travelling faster than a train, slammed into her.

She never saw her daughter, son and mother again.

"I was hanging onto the roof and thinking I never had a chance
to ask for my mother's forgiveness," Sartinah said, the tears
flowing down her cheeks. "As a Muslim you have to ask
forgiveness. If your mother doesn't forgive you, you can't go to
heaven."

The disaster of biblical proportions drew a veritable Noah's
Ark of faith-based groups to the tsunami region, including Muslim
Aid, which is building 172 traditional Acehnese homes in Kampong
Java. Some survivors wondered why God had unleased such terrible
fury on their communities

Overall, the international community raised more than $11
billion, "the most generous and most immediately funded
international emergency relief effort ever", U.N. emergency
coordinator Jan Egeland said.

Muslim Aid took its design for panggung houses to the
surviving residents of Kampong Java and allowed them to customise
the design to their own needs,

The result was a 48-sq-metre (516 sq ft) three-room, quake-
resistant home on thick timber stilts, with concrete walls, a
corrugated roof and front verandah.

"All the homes look different, so it doesn't look like a
Council housing project," said H. Fadlullah Wilmot, Muslim Aid's
country director in Indonesia.

The donor community has pushed for community involvement in
the $10 billion reconstruction effort in the main tsunami
affected countries, one of the reasons home rebuilding has gone
so slowly, Oxfam International said in a report on Wednesday.

"'Do it quick, but do it with communities' was the motto when
working on shelter throughout the tsunami zone," it said.

Bureaucratic problems in acquiring land, unclear government
policies and aid agencies' lack of expertise in building shelters
also contributed to delays.

Wreckage in minds

Only 15 percent of the 308,000 homes that need to be built in
tsunami affected countries have been completed or under
construction, according to government data.

While the physical debris has largely been cleared from
coastal communities, health workers worry about the wreckage in
peoples' minds.

The tsunami pulverised entire communities and slaughtered its
inhabitants. The monster waves left thousands of orphans,
"bachelor towns", women bereft of children and the compounded
grief from multiple deaths in families in its awful wake.

A year ago, women outnumbered men in Aceh. A long-running
separatist rebellion had thinned the ranks of possible grooms.
but the tsunami killed up to 75 percent of the women in coastal
communities of Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka and now thousands
of widowers are looking for brides.

An Oxfam report in March said women were slowed by the
children they carried and were less likely to know how to swim.
Men, on the other hand, were out on boats, running errands, or
working further inland in fields or hills.

Some women still cling to an irrational hope their children
are alive; others are undergoing reversals of tubal ligations to
try and have babies again.

Aid groups such as New York-based International Rescue
Committee have set up "child friendly spaces" to help heal the
psychic wounds of the young and most vulnerable.

About a fifth of Aceh's children are suffering at least slight
trauma requiring intervention, said Sonny Irwan, an IRC programme
coordinator for Cot village down the coast from Kampong Java.
There, kindergarten children draw pictures, play on swings -- and
sing songs with incredible gusto.

Through these forms of expression they can draw on their own
inner strengths and heal, he said

"In the beginning, they just drew pictures of the tsunami,"
Irwan said. "Now the pictures are of normal families with the sun
and the sky."

REUTERS

GetRTR 3.00 -- DEC 15, 2005 10:49:07