Moving On

Within hours after the Asian tsunami struck in December 2004, Devi Asmarani was reporting on the disaster from its ground zero in Aceh. She returned to the province in June to catch up with old friends and observe the changes taking place.

The 3,000-ton floating power plant still stands on the same spot it landed four years ago, when the tsunami swept it overland into Punge, a neighborhood about three kilometers from the Banda Aceh coast.

Sixty-three meters long and four stories high, the vessel looks more imposing and out of place than ever amid the newly built homes dotting the surrounding area, which was flattened by the killer waves.

It has been turned into a museum, I was told, but Owin, the young man who greeted me, said an afternoon prayer was being conducted in the ship. He guided me to the Tsunami Education Park next door to see pictures of the Dec. 26, 2004, catastrophe.

It is a curious feeling to be back in Banda Aceh after nearly three years.

More so for me is the impression that life has, at least on the surface, returned to normal, even at the site where a gargantuan reminder of the disaster is not likely to be removed anytime soon.

This was my sixth visit to Banda Aceh since the tsunami, and my eighth in all. By now I have witnessed the city going through several different phases.

On my arrival, I passed by the construction of a two-story airport building that is near completion.

Not far from that, a spacious new but temporary departure terminal recently opened. It gleams and exudes a kind of efficiency still lacking just 500 meters away at the old terminal, which is now designated for arrivals only.

A new fence has been put up around a mass grave near the airport. Having been on the same spot four years ago, watching volunteers excavating the soil and throwing bodies into a gaping cavity, I thought the grassy field now looks undeservedly understated, benign even. The wave-shaped walls erected in one corner remind me too much of an ocean park logo.

But perhaps this is how places that have endured a great catastrophe survive; they move on.

Gone is the stench of death and the thick, choking dust that emanated from the rubble in the first few months after the tsunami. In their place now is traffic that seems busier than before the disaster. Indeed, a World Bank study shows motor vehicle ownership on the rise in the past two years.

The whole town seems to thrive on an economy spurred by the reconstruction efforts.

I checked in at one of the three four-star hotels built in Banda Aceh over the past three years, and remembered journalists having to sleep in their cars, or drive three hours to a hotel in Lhokseumawe, when the city was still buried in rubble, enshrouded by darkness, without power or communication.

Since then, several establishments have opened to cater to the aid workers, or what locals call the NGO people.

There is an Italian restaurant, a Western-style coffee shop, several fast-food chains, even a small grocery store with imported food items like New Zealand lean beef, blocks of fresh mozzarella cheese and soy-based energy bars.

If you stay discreet and come with a foreigner, you can even buy beer or wine at a downtown store, despite a ban on alcohol in this Islamic law-ruled province.

THE LAND
I try to imagine myself as a first-time visitor to Banda Aceh, without prior knowledge of the tsunami or Aceh’s violent past.

Under this circumstance, it seems possible to be oblivious to the fact that this was the epicenter of a disaster that spanned 13 Asian and African countries along the Indian Ocean, killed a quarter of a million people and left 2 million others homeless.

To an uninformed visitor, Banda Aceh could pass off as a town that is in a hurry to develop, with new houses – all of uniform size and shape – sprouting up and freshly constructed infrastructure and public facilities.

That is until you see the accompanying signboards staked out to show the benefactors of these structures – British Red Cross, Islamic Relief, the governments of various countries, Coca-Cola and hundreds of other donor organizations.

A roughly 800-kilometer stretch of Aceh’s coast – roughly the distance from Paris to Berlin – was flattened by the tsunami that was triggered by a 9-magnitude earthquake. At least 140,000 people in Aceh were killed or went missing.

I revisited Ulee Lheu – once a densely populated coastal district before the towering wall of water wiped out just about everything, save for a handful of mangled structures – and did not recognize the area.

Most of the roads there have been re-paved, and there are neat lines of houses of various colors and conditions, some still under construction.

According to the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Executing Agency for Aceh and Nias, about 87 percent of the 120,000 homes destroyed in Aceh by the waves have been rebuilt as of March. This is a major achievement compared with other disaster areas in the world, I was told.

In addition, about 60,000 hectares of rice fields and shrimp ponds are back in use, not including 36,000 hectares of new fields and ponds.

“Many of our targets have been achieved, some better than expected,” the agency’s director, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, told me in his office in Banda Aceh.

But many of the homes are not occupied, judging from their neglected appearance.

Kuntoro conceded that some of the houses were built without access to water, electricity or a drainage system. Some were also constructed in such haste following the tsunami that their quality was compromised.

Many survivors simply refuse to occupy these houses.

THE SURVIVORS
There are about 1,300 families still living in temporary barracks around Aceh. One of these people is Rista Hartono, whom I met during a 2005 trip.

He makes a living diving in the waters around his village, Kakap in Ulee Lheu, fetching scrap metal from shipwrecks or catching lobsters and fish with a spear gun.

Before the tsunami, he sometimes also traveled to other regions to work in underwater construction.

The disaster killed 70 members of his family, including his wife, two sons, parents and siblings. His home and much of the village were swept away.

Within a few months of the disaster, he went back to his village and set up a tent in the area, and started diving for scrap metal again, using only a mask, snorkel and fins.

Since our last meeting in 2005, we have been in contact a few times through mobile phone text messages. Once I sent him a set of snorkeling gear, but for over a year, I had lost touch with him and his phone number no longer works.

If I had just one mission to accomplish on this trip, it was to find him. I hoped that he had gone on to better things.

Through a mutual friend, I managed to track him down. It turned out he was living in a wooden barracks a few hundred meters away from his old tent, with five other families.

He has a 2-year-old daughter with his new wife, Devi, a volunteer he met at a camp for displaced persons three years ago.

When I last saw him, life was much tougher. Living six to a tent among the broken structures and marshes of Kakap, people slept on mattresses they found among the rubble. Yet he seemed more spirited then; life seemed to present hope.

Rista’s face had grown soft and his belly was a little paunchy, and there was an air of heaviness around him.

“Life has been like this – nothing much has changed,” he said, his face half buried under a cap, as we sat at a food stall behind his barracks.

He has done everything he can, but a new home still eludes him, he says. The six families will soon have to evacuate the barracks because the area is to be converted into a recreational complex.

But he and his friends have a new boat from an aid organization. They have also borrowed a compressor to supply air from the boat, so they can stay underwater longer.

He told me some Singaporeans have promised to give them an underwater saw to cut up scrap metal and make their job easier.

I asked him if he still thought or dreamed about his family, and the ordeal he went through to survive the tsunami.

“From day one I’ve never had those kinds of dreams, but I am still sad when I pass the site of my old house,” he said.

A SILVER LINING BEHIND EVERY CLOUD
Many recent articles and reports I read on Aceh tend to be overly pessimistic and skeptical of the reconstruction process.

They say the efforts are not enough and make the Acehnese too dependent on aid. They warn that the economic bubble will burst once the reconstruction agency completes its mandate in April next year, and most foreign aid organizations leave the province.

A total of 20,000 people, mostly construction workers, will reportedly be out of work when the organizations wrap up their projects and pull out.

Even now unemployment remains high, despite the job opportunities created by the rebuilding projects. But the foreign and local organizations involved in the reconstruction process have employed a large number of skilled, educated young workers.

Many of these organizations have in the past few months downsized their operations, and most will leave come next year.

Kuntoro says the agriculture sector, which is now experiencing a rebound, will absorb the workers from the construction sector.

But what will happen to the educated young Acehnese who have benefited from the higher pay standards of the aid organizations when they are faced with a drastically shrinking labor market?

I ask an old friend, Azwar Hassan, a native of Pidie, East Aceh, who now leads his own organization while working on AusAid projects in Aceh, what he thinks will happen.

Azwar left Jakarta for Aceh a day after the tsunami to look for his relatives, and soon decided he would stay and help.

With funds raised from his domestic and overseas networks, he set up Forum Bangun Aceh, which now focuses on micro financing for tsunami survivors.

He employs young Acehnese to help their fellow survivors, and the group has so far financed 800 small-scale business enterprises with revolving funds amounting to 4 billion rupiah.

Azwar told me the disaster has created “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities for the Acehnese, and not just in the form of opportunistic short-term economic gain.

“For me, personally, it gave me the chance to return and do something for my people,” he said.

Decades of bloody conflict between separatists and Indonesian security forces have conditioned the Acehnese to be very inward looking, he said.

But the exposure to the “outside world”, a new world created by the humanitarian and aid efforts, has in a way opened their eyes, cultivating a sense of openness and, most importantly, a stronger desire for progress, he said.

“If there is no job around here, they’ll find jobs someplace else, they have the credentials and the experience now.”

It helps that Aceh is also more accessible now. There are several flights going into Aceh every day, including two linking Banda Aceh to Malaysia. A lot of Acehnese who can afford it now prefer to travel to Malaysia because it is cheaper than going to Jakarta.

Similar sentiments have been expressed to me by other people, both Acehnese and non-Acehnese.

Maybe it’s not as gloomy as the media seems to make out.

A few days later, I was sipping my Ulee Kareng, a coffee reputed to count marijuana among its ingredients, at a popular coffee stall when a man sat down at our table and started a conversation.

He is a former driver who has not had a job for a while, except for some construction work.

“He’s a little stressed now,” my driver, Emon, warns under his breath, apologizing for his friend’s erratic behavior.

A muezzin’s call for prayers outside provided a clue for the waiters to roll down the overhead aluminum door.

It is common practice for restaurants and shops to close their doors and shutters during prayer times because local law mandates that men must pray.

We sat in semidarkness with about 20 other people, including a group of police officers. The jobless driver chatted with us about investing in the coffee business with him.

I felt a tinge of relief.

Aceh may still be a long way from full recovery, but like its people, resilient and proud, it will always take care of itself.

Photos: Devi Asmarani

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