Tsunami creates bachelor villagers

Tsunami creates bachelor villagers

Bill Tarrant, Reuters/Meunasah Mesjid, Aceh

Nestled between steep, forested hills and a white sandy beach,
Meunasah Mesjid is one of Aceh's new bachelor villages after the
Dec. 26 tsunami, which killed a disproportionate number of women
and children.

The biggest tsunami ever recorded, triggered by the strongest
earthquake in 45 years, killed nine out of 10 people in this
picturesque village on Aceh's northern coast, a mere 150
kilometers from the quake's epicenter.

Only 161 of Meunasah Mesjid's 1,110 people survived -- just 45
of them females.

The people here now live in tents pitched amidst twisted cars,
endless piles of rubble and ruined paddy field, utterly dependent
on distributions of food, water and other aid.

"A lot of the men were up in the hills cutting meranti trees
for logs. Others were in the paddy fields and some men work in
the city," said the village's recovery coordinator, Mulia,
explaining why more men survived.

Some men were also out fishing at sea and many of them
survived as the wave passed under their boats.

In some villages, the disaster killed up to four times as many
women as men, international aid group Oxfam said after a survey
of villages. Its finding were similar in India and Sri Lanka.

"In some villages it now appear that up to 80 percent of those
killed were women," Becky Buell, Oxfam's policy director, said in
the report released on March 26.

"We are already hearing about rapes, harassment and forced
early marriages," she said.

A group of women gathered at lunchtime in the community hall,
now being used as the tsunami recovery center, said that hadn't
happened in Meunasah Mesjid. But single, divorced and widowed
women acknowledged they were coming under pressure to marry.

"I get a lot of pressure to marry and have children, but I
haven't found my soulmate yet," said Omrahwati, 32, who like many
others in the village was wearing a hat, shirt, gloves and
galoshes that the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) is distributing to villages throughout Aceh as part of a
clean-up campaign.

"There's pressure," said Elliyana, 19. "I want to marry an
Acehnese. There's a lot of choices now, so that's good."

The tsunami took an appalling toll on children, many of whom
were home on a Sunday morning with their mothers.

Mulia said in Meunasah only eight children between the ages of
two to nine survived, along with four teenagers.

Many women and young children, struggling to stay afloat or on
their feet, simply tired and drowned when the tsunami, traveling
at speeds of 45 kms an hour or more, raced across Aceh's coastal
plain.

Women clinging to one or several children would tire even more
quickly, Oxfam said.

"I'm afraid to get married again," said Zora, 35 and divorced.
Three of her five children were lost in the tsunami. "But I do
want to have children again."

Men may face problems of their own once their lives regain
some semblance of normalcy as they take on unfamiliar household
tasks or look after their families.

Some may could become willing recruits for Acehnese separatist
rebels hiding up in the hills.

The men in the community hall say their sympathies are with
the Free Aceh Movement, known by its Indonesian acronym, GAM. But
they are hedging their bets.

"People here are 'wait and see'. If GAM is winning, they'll
join the revolution. If the government is winning, they'll follow
the government. But our sympathy is with GAM," said one
fisherman.

A rebel commander who grew up in Meunasah came out of the
hills a day after the disaster to hand out rice and fish -- the
first aid distribution in the village, Mulia said.

But the men might also find gainful employment courtesy of the
USAID, which is building a 247 km road from the capital Banda
Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra to Meulaboh on the west
coast. The road will run through Meunasah.

USAID said its primary objective is to make a "significant
contribution to improving livelihoods, employment and the local
economy."