Articles and Updates

Sorry for the amount of time between posts. There is a lot going on here, and most of it is very good. I have been asked to extend for another three months, and I think I will. Despite the stress, it is an amazing experience.

The work continues intense: 11 hour days 6 days a week. But I am getting more in the swing of things—an expert at doing this work just came up from Jakarta for four days, and we dug into reorganizing information flows and organizing everything. Lots of meetings with the sector heads—and I now feel like I may know what is happening in this office better than almost anyone.

The piece below is something that I pulled together to possibly go into the Cap Times in Madison. I have not had a chance to really edit it yet, but I wanted to put something up here. Please let me know what you think and how I can make it better:



Coming into Banda Aceh from the airport, a month after the earthquake and tsunami that made this region world famous, it is hard to tell that anything has happened to this regular Indonesian city. The roads are full of people on motorbikes, the women’s headscarves flapping in the wind. There are food stalls packed with people, and cows and chickens wandering out into the middle of the road. Nothing special.

Coming in from in land, there are few signs that this city lost over seventy percent of its population in one morning, on December 26th. I was making the drive into Banda Aceh as part of the Save the Children Emergency Response, coming to take my role as the Information, Communication, and Media manager in the Banda Aceh office. I grew up for over six years in Indonesia, and I was used to the sights and smells of a normal Indonesian town. This seemed almost shockingly normal. We drove past an empty lot with a bull dozer flattening down the red earth, “That’s the mass grave, the driver said, “Over 100,000 people are buried there”. Not so normal after all.

Not So Normal

The morning, I was taken out to see the real reason why I had come to Aceh. As we drove through town, towards the coast, the signs of what had happened began to appear. First to become apparent was the earthquake damage: There were huge concrete office buildings that had fallen in on themselves, leaving piles of rubble. There were three story buildings where the first story had collapsed, leaving an almost perfectly intact two story building. The driver told us how the water had reached this far into town—at least 4 miles from the coast.

And, then, turning a corner, there is a perfect view to the ocean, unimpeded by any of the buildings that are normally so tightly packed together. It would be a mistake to say that there is nothing left of the area where to tsunami hit. There are the foundations of buildings, flat to the ground, washed by the rain. There are outlines of where rooms and houses stood, concrete outlines in the ground. There are occasional cement buildings, some almost perfectly intact, standing in almost ludicrous contrast to the flatness around it. On almost all the standing remains, there is graffiti: “The owner of this land is still alive”, “Here was such and such a village”, “Tears”, “We must rise again”, and on a building right next to the sea, “Remember! We all must die”.

My roommate’s story

Seventy percent of the population of Banda Aceh died that morning. Debi, a co-worker at Save the Children, told me what happened to her. She had been a college student, studying English in the local university. The morning that the earthquake hit, she was cleaning up her room, getting ready to start her day. When the earthquake hit, she was in her second story apartment. She was thrown to the ground three times before she could get outside. She considered herself lucky—she was able to grab her head scarf. Some girls in this intensely Islamic region were forced to run outside in their towels. The earthquake went on for 15 minutes. When it was beginning to die down, the girls went back into their apartment to grab their clothes, cell phones, and wallets.

While they were in their apartment, they heard someone yelling, “Run! The water is rising!”, Everyone began to run away from the coast. Debi’s friend grabbed her hand and pulled her down the stairs and out to the road. It was packed with people, and she was torn away from her friend. My roommate decided to run back into the house, and go upstairs, hoping that that would protect her. She learned later that this friend had died in the tsunami. Back in her second story apartment, she waited with 5 roommates all standing on the balcony, looking out to sea, and waiting.

It went completely silent. The people running had passed, and the roads were deserted. Then sound began to fill the air. Debi described it as the sound of a thousand horses running. The wave pulled in with tremendous force. It was not the tsunami of TV or movies; it did not come as a wave, washing over everyone. It came as a flood. The water flooded in at tremendous speed, washing up the buildings, covering 10 feet in a mater of seconds. The water was thick with mud and the remains of houses, cars, and people that it had swept up. Debi and her friends realized that there was no way they were high enough on the second floor. They climbed onto the roof of their house, and then further onto their neighbor’s roof. There they watched the water swirl, only a few inches beneath their roof.

By that afternoon, the water had subsided. It had left behind waist deep mud and piles of debris. Cars had been picked up by tsunami and rolled into scrap metal. The remains of thousands of houses were strewn where the wave had left them, in the middle of the city. Hundreds of thousands of bodies were everywhere. As my roommate and her friends waded through the mud, they ran into people dying and dead all around. They ran into children drowning in the mud. They injured themselves on the remains of houses. In the end, they waded out through the disaster, and found their way to the road, where they were taken to a camp.

The Relief Effort

It took a while the relief effort to come to Aceh. There was almost no way to get in. All the roads were destroyed, and there was only one small provincial airport. But when the aid began come in, it was incredible. Aid has come from all over the world. Going around Banda Aceh is a testament to the caring from around the world. There are trucks caring debris from Yemen, there are temporary schools from Turkey, the Kuwaitis have brought in bulldozers and other heavy equipment. There are temporary hospitals from the Germans, the Australians, the French. Then there are the humanitarian organizations. There are an estimated 2,000 humanitarian organizations in Aceh right now, both national and international. Around town, you can see their cars. Every organization marks its cars with its stickers- the International Committee of the Red Cross, Care, Mercy Corps, Concern International, MSF, Save the Children, and so many more.

This may seem a lot, but when compared to the destruction, it feels like nothing. There are refugee camps every few kilometers, up and down the coast. They are tent cities, slowly being replaced by wooden barracks. The camps are being looked after by governmental and NGO actors, but there is so much to be done. In some camps, water and sanitation are close to non-existent. Many, perhaps most, children are still out of school. People in the camps still have many needs that are not yet being met, despite the best wishes of so many organizations. The estimate right now is that over 600,000 people were made homeless by the tsunami. It is impossible to image how much reconstruction must take place to repopulate the now near-empty coast.

The Beginning
This outpouring of effort is only the beginning of what needs to happen in Aceh. It needs to be recognized that the needs in Aceh are great, and they there is no way that anything will begin to be solved this month, or this year. I will be here for the next few months at least, but it is going to take the work of many organizations for many years until the wounds of this begin to heal. This is not a plea for money, or a plea to drop your life and come out and volunteer. It is a plea to remember.

As life begins to regain some normality for those who survived the tsunami, it gains normality with a backdrop of destruction of lives, livelihoods, and a way of life. As the media coverage of tsunami aftermath becomes less and less it may become possible to become oblivious to those 200,000 people who love their lives in Aceh, and 600,000 that were left, injured or homeless. The people who survived the tsunami are still here, and will be here, working to recreate or improve the lives that they had in the past. They need to be remembered.