Progress, despair evident in Aceh

Progress, despair evident in Aceh

Chris Brummitt, Associated Press/Banda Aceh

Trucks piled high with bodies speed through the city en route to freshly dug mass graves, passing a busy market stocked with fresh goat meat and bananas. Shoppers don't look up, or seem to notice the stench that trails from the corpses.

Just down the street, scavengers wearing shorts and flip-flops dig through mountains of rubble left by the tsunami alongside hundreds of backhoes clearing the tangled mess of concrete, metal and wood so the city can start over.

In the dozens of squalid refugee camps, new mothers nurse their babies amid the smell of human sewage. Some refugees are starting to move into larger, cleaner government-built camps.

Others are opting to return home and rebuild villages that were washed away by the giant waves.

Nearly eight weeks after the tsunami, despair is still clearly visible throughout Banda Aceh, the capital of Indonesia's Aceh province -- but so are hope and progress. Conditions highlight successes of the international relief effort, as well as the remaining challenges.

Governments and individuals have pledged more than US$4.5 billion to tsunami relief efforts.

On Saturday, former U.S. presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton will visit Banda Aceh to assess reconstruction efforts and view the destruction firsthand. The two were appointed by President George W. Bush to help raise awareness and aid for the disaster.

The waves left about a third of Banda Aceh's 320,000 residents dead or missing, local officials say. With so many killed, the pain of the bereaved is never far away.

Achmad Syukri, a 38-year-old shopkeeper, lost his mother and the house he grew up in to the waves. Since the disaster, he has returned weekly to sit amid the ruins, remembering the mango trees he planted when he was a boy, the shouts of the neighborhood boys playing soccer and the cool breeze that blew off the ocean.

"The pain never really ends, but coming here somehow stills my heart," said Syukri, gazing at what's left of his former life. "The memories sustain me."

Photocopied pictures of the missing are posted on walls and trees throughout the city, and their smiling faces fill a small advertising section in the region's only newspaper under a simple headline: "Seeking." Some family snapshots have as many as five people identified as missing.

The tsunami, spawned by a monster earthquake under the sea to the west, leveled neighborhood after neighborhood and tossed ships several kilometers (miles) inland in this once-picturesque city on the northern tip of Sumatra island.

For days afterward, bodies littered the streets and the few health clinics still functioning were overwhelmed. Drugs ran low and rubbish piled up in corridors.

An influx of Indonesian and foreign doctors, along with several military field hospitals, gradually took the strain off the city's health system.

These days, the city's military hospital -- which handled most of the injured and once had 400 bloated corpses lying in its parking lot -- has spare beds and clean hallways that smell of disinfectant. Outside, laughing children play hide-and-seek in the manicured gardens.

"We are over the worst," said Rajali, an engineer visiting his expectant wife in the hospital. Of the city's future, he said: "It is down to us now. Do we make an effort or just wait for foreign aid?"

Commerce is also slowly returning. Two hotels have reopened amid an influx of hundreds of foreign aid workers. Owners whose houses are still standing charge the visitors up to US$5,000 a month and compete to rent them cars, office assistants and translators.

The city's hundreds of cafes are back in business serving Sumatra's famous coffee as well as its renowned crab noodles - a dish until recently kept off the menu out of fear that the crabs were feeding off human bodies washed out to sea.

"The time for mourning is over and we are now thinking of the future," Banda Aceh Mayor Mawardi Nurdin told The Associated Press. "Fisherman are going back to sea and businesses have started trading. We are rising again."

The government has proposed moving many coastal villages at least 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) inland and seeding the shoreline with mangroves and trees that could absorb any future tsunami.

In Banda Aceh, the government is talking with Malaysian planners -- many of whom helped design that country's administrative capital Putrajaya, a carefully landscaped complex blending modern offices with Islamic architecture -- about building 120,000 new homes and a seawall to protect the city.

The emergency phase of the relief effort was lauded by U.N. officials as a success. Feared outbreaks of disease did not materialize, and most survivors in the city and along the region's battered coast receive regular supplies of rice, cooking oil and fish, aid workers say.

But most experts predict it will take at least five years for Banda Aceh to fully recover.

Unemployment remains sky-high, though the United Nations plans to hire thousands of survivors, many of them refugee camp residents, to clear the streets.

Thousands of others earn a living picking through the debris for usable scrap.

"What else I am going to do?" says Syaiful Ismain, who before the tsunami sold clothes in a now-destroyed market. "My house was destroyed. There is no other work."

Islamic activists, students and Red Cross officials also work amid the rubble, looking for corpses. The volunteers joke with each other over countless cigarettes, which they say covers up the stench.

"I think I would go crazy if I just sat around," said Adrian Siregar, one of the self-described "body hunters." "I have to help the people of the city."