UN to build 20,000 temporary homes in Aceh by April
UN to build 20,000 temporary homes in Aceh by April
Arijit Ghosh, Bloomberg News/Jakarta
The United Nations and an aid agency plan to build as many as 20,000 temporary homes in Indonesia's tsunami-affected Aceh province to give shelter to some of the 500,000 homeless as the rainy season starts.
The UN and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are funding the project to move displaced people living in tents, which have begun to decay, almost a year after the tsunami, said Brian Wood, team leader at the Australia- Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development, which is helping build the homes.
"Many, many people are still in tents," Azwar Abubakar, acting governor of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, said in an interview in the provincial capital Banda Aceh on Dec. 6. "That's why we take assistance from the UN to give 20,000 temporary houses. So by January all the persons in tents will go to temporary houses."
For people affected by the tsunami, this will be the second rainy season they will have to live in tents as construction of permanent homes fell 66 percent short of target. The government wants to move people into prefabricated steel houses until their homes are ready, Abubakar said. The magnitude-9 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra on Dec. 26, 2004, which generated the tsunami, left more than 160,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia.
Sumatra island, of which Aceh is the westernmost province, receives an average of about 3,000 millimeters of rainfall a year compared with an average of about 1,500 millimeters in other parts of the country, according to the Indonesian Agroclimate and Hydrology Research Institute.
The 30-meter waves destroyed 140,000 homes and damaged property valued at Rp 41.4 trillion (US$4.1 billion) in the Aceh.
More than 230,000 people are dead or missing in 12 countries after the tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean devastating coastlines and communities in its path.
The prefabricated homes, being made by Siam Steel International Pcl., a Thai maker of furniture and ready-made homes, will take about five people to construct in two days, Wood said in a village outside Band Aceh, while inspecting the start of construction of the homes, about 200 meters from a ship marooned 3 kilometers inland by the tsunami.
Dora Cheok, a spokeswoman at the UN, declined to disclose the cost of building the homes. Thanyapong Sinsoongsud, a sales manager at Siam Steel, said the company was selling the homes at a discount, without disclosing the value.
The tsunami displaced about 13 percent, or about 504,000 people, the Indonesian Statistics Bureau said in a statement on Nov. 29. The province has a population of 4 million. About 318,700 people are unemployed in the province, the survey found.
The UN will pay Rp 35,000 ($3.5) a day to workers who construct the homes as part of its cash-for-work program.
The construction of homes has been slow because "all the land titles" are gone, Indonesia's Vice President Jusuf Kalla said in an interview on Nov. 26. With no documents to prove ownership of land, the Aceh reconstruction agency, Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi, which was asked to build 30,000 houses this year, has only built 11,000 homes with 14,000 more under construction.
The agency and non-government organizations expect to construct 100,000 homes next year.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has said Indonesia will need about $5 billion during the next five years to rebuild the towns and infrastructure destroyed by the world's worst natural disaster in at least 30 years. The funds would be equivalent to almost 2 percent of the country's gross domestic product.