Tsunami village yet to see aid windfall

Tsunami village yet to see aid windfall

Bill Tarrant, Reuters/Lampuuk, Aceh

Juwaria hammers away at cement rubble, extracting iron rods she
will sell to buy food, oblivious that her tsunami-flattened
village is benefiting from an aid windfall.

Many foreign visitors have come to Lampuuk -- including former
U.S. presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton -- and a variety of
aid workers have left their banners in the town, where more than
four out of every five people died in the Dec. 26 earthquake and
tsunami.

But almost five months after the disaster, the village with a
population of 6,500 before the tsunami hit is still a sea of
rubble.

Bush and Clinton raised US$10 million at a Houston, Texas
fundraiser on May 6 for projects in four countries swamped by the
monster waves that are feared to have killed 228,000 people
around the region, including 160,000 in Indonesia.

Some of the money is earmarked for Lampuuk, a coastal town
just outside Aceh's provincial capital, Banda Aceh.

"Oh, we didn't know about this," village chief and rice farmer
Hamdan Hasyen, 40, told Reuters.

"We're happy to hear that. Hopefully, they'll come again and
stay with us so they can see the situation here," he said, adding
that Lampuuk had renamed its main street "Bill Clinton George
Bush Road".

Lampuuk is known as the place where the tsunami traveled the
furthest inland -- some 7 km (4 miles) until it smacked into
steep hillsides that show wave marks 10 meters high.
The only building left standing was a two-store mosque, which now
can be seen from miles away.

About 250 of the village's survivors live in tattered UN tents
that regularly collapse now the western monsoon has set in. The
rest live in army-style barracks. They draw power from a 1,500-
watt generator and water from a huge tank donated by Oxfam.

Money from the Bush-Clinton fundraiser will be used to rebuild
a school, a health clinic, women's center and a small market as
well as repair the water system in Lampuuk, which the two ex-
presidents visited on Feb. 20. It will also pay for some
scholarships to universities in Texas and Arkansas.

That all seems a little distant to people who are struggling
to survive.

Hasyen and others in the town say nobody has given them food
aid since the end of February.

The World Food Program, which is distributing 10,000 tonnes of
food a month to nearly 600,000 displaced people in Aceh, concedes
that Lampuuk is missing out.

CARE, one of the groups distributing WFP commodities, had
determined that the people living in Lampuuk's tent camp were
getting food from another aid group and decided to stop
deliveries, a WFP official in Banda Aceh told Reuters.

Hasyen insists that this is not the case and points to a white
board on the Rahamatullah mosque showing a list of NGO
activities, none of which involve food distribution.
The WFP said it would send a team to the village to investigate
the situation.

The group's emergency coordinator, Charlie Higgins, said WFP
stopped distributing food when it determined recipients had an
independent source of livelihood and no longer need relief.

"If people have an income, it's counterproductive to give out
aid. We're considering how to do that in certain areas."

The overall situation in Lampuuk illustrates a central dilemma
in the Aceh aid effort. While the government has declared the
emergency phase of the disaster over, and foreign aid groups are
poised to begin rehabilitation work, hundreds of thousands of
people are still struggling to survive day to day.

Many Lampuuk residents now comb the rubble for concrete
reinforcing rods they will sell to a scrap dealer. Although they
wear USAID gloves and galoshes with shirts that read "Cleaning up
Equals Prosperity", very little cleaning up is being done.
Juwaria, 48, says she can salvage abut 30 kg of iron rods a day,
or about Rp 24,000 ($2.50) worth. "I'm selling the iron for
food."

Hasyen says Lampuuk has enough equipment for only 50 people to
work in the clean-up crews. "The rest are out looking for iron to
get money for food, to get petrol for the generator and stuff."
Rehabilitation work is progressing in Lampuuk, although the
natural elements are still the worst of enemies.

Oxfam erected frames for a couple of model temporary homes
before they were blown down in a windstorm this week. It is also
helping to restore paddy fields.

German Agro Asia is planting mango tree gardens and working to
counter the elements by sowing pine saplings to create a
windbreak on the beach.