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."