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.