Where 100-foot waves flattened communities into piles of tinder wood now stand row upon row of cookie-cutter houses.
In place of still-submerged broken roadway are miles of freshly paved roads hugging the newly defined coastline and winding through mountain villages. City streets once dark, putrid and littered with bodies today bustle with cellphone stores, coffee shops, banks, hotels and even a four-story shopping mall complete with a kids’ fun zone.
“Now, we have traffic jams, never before,” said Sri Muharani, a 23-year-old law student, sitting outside a new KFC outlet in the center of Banda Aceh.
Thanks to billions of aid dollars and help from hundreds of international relief organizations, this city’s physical recovery from the massive earthquake and tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, has been nothing less than spectacular.
Yet as Aceh province marks the 10th anniversary of the disaster, it is struggling to maintain momentum as its economic growth slows, unemployment increases and poverty rises. For all its successes in rebuilding after sustaining nearly $5 billion in damage, Aceh’s recovery has been highly uneven and incomplete. And now it is at risk of stalling altogether because the international relief agencies whose largesse served as the community’s financial savior have largely packed up and gone home.
The Indonesian government estimates that in the first few years after the tsunami, about 700 domestic and international organizations worked to deliver more than $7 billion of aid, with tens of thousands of staff on the ground. Across the tsunami zone in which more than 230,000 people died in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India about $14 billion in aid was received.
In Aceh province, which bore the brunt of the disaster with nearly 170,000 lives lost, many in coastal cities such as Banda Aceh, the influx of aid brought better living conditions, greater access to health clinics, and cleaner water and sanitation.
“Those who survived ended up with much better infrastructure and basic services,” said Tom Alcedo, the American Red Cross representative in Indonesia.
Today, however, most of the humanitarian operations in Aceh have shuttered, leaving only a few dozen minimally staffed nongovernmental organizations. Save the Children, which helped reunite about 1,300 children separated from their parents, has gone from 1,000 workers in Aceh early in the recovery to a single staffer, who focuses on microfinancing issues.
Though rich in oil and gas, Aceh had seen its economic growth stunted by separatist fighting since 1976 as the Free Aceh Movement under exiled leaders battled central government forces over resources, Islamic law and other issues. Though the earthquake and tsunami brought peace, Aceh’s rural backwaters had little in the way of any industry or livelihood to turn to, apart from farming. The relief efforts didn’t change that; there simply weren’t many livelihood-support programs in the province, said the Asian Development Bank in a detailed assessment of the recovery.
Moreover, about 80 percent of projects aimed at helping people become self-sufficient have been failures, concluded Saiful Mahdi, the director of the International Center for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies in Banda Aceh.
Fishing, a major industry in Aceh, provides one case study. Government reports say that within just a couple of years of the tsunami, seaports were back up and nearly all of the 4,700 lost coastal fishing boats had been replaced. But Mahdi noted that some of the donated boats were too narrow. Aceh fishermen prefer wide flat-bottom boats that are more suited for shallow waters.
Similarly, big challenges remain for farming, which accounts for one-third of Aceh’s economy and about half of all employment. Mahdi said it wasn’t enough to help locals ensure that the soil is good desalinization was a major task after the tsunami but aid groups should have done more to help with financing, technology and sales.
“You have to follow up all the way to marketing,” he says. “It’s the whole cycle of livelihood.”
Abdullah Murah Raya, 69, and his wife, Nurhayati, lost two of their seven sons, along with seven employees, their seaside home and nearly all 13 of their furniture stores. It has been a slow and painful recovery, they said, but today the Raya family has three more stores than before and a new home.
“It was like starting a brand-new life,” Nurhayati said. Her husband added: “I’m still haunted by the memories of my missing sons, the memories of losing everything. But we prayed and let it go. It was our destiny.”
Tampa Bay Times