Tsunami Survivors Rebuild Village Life

By David Snyder

Through a thin cloud of cigarette smoke, Andah and a small circle of neighbors gather in his living room for a discussion of the day's news. A monsoon rain pounds the metal roof overhead, adding a white-noise backdrop to the tea and coffee chatter. It is a typical day in rural Indonesia. And that is exactly the story.

For years following the tsunami that devastated the Aceh region of Indonesia, such days were impossible. With hundreds of thousands of Indonesians displaced by the tsunami, their homes lost to the waves, years passed in the limbo of slow recovery. From the early days of emergency assistance, to the months and even years spent living in tents as humanitarian agencies and the government of Indonesia worked out the best plan to rebuild, the people of Aceh have been working to regain their footing.

For Andah, headman of the village of Pulo, those days are still fresh in his memory. Though the village of 70 homes was completely destroyed by the tsunami, Andah and his fellow villagers were lucky. Just after the earthquake that preceded it, and minutes before the tsunami hit, they were evacuated inland by a nearby military unit. Only one villager was killed—a small toll compared to what many paid that day across Aceh, where more than 160,000 people lost their lives.

The weeks that followed were filled with confusion, despair and the kindness of Indonesians who provided what they could to tsunami survivors. It was then that the full weight of donations from around the world began arriving in the form of relief from humanitarian organizations like Catholic Relief Services. The agency was quick to respond in Indonesia and across the region.

"About one month after the tsunami, CRS began providing relief," Andah recalls. "We got rice, cooking utensils and clothes."

Tents were soon to follow, and then building materials for temporary shelters made of wood and metal. Permanent homes were soon under construction—3,982 will be built in Aceh—a process for which CRS was and remains careful to include input from the beneficiaries themselves. As the homes took shape, Andah says, he and his fellow villagers were eager to help out.

"The community came to monitor, and sometimes we worked on the homes and provided labor to contractors," Andah says.

Home Improvements

Over the course of one year, all of Pulo's 70 homes were rebuilt at a location further inland from the original village. CRS built roads to the new site, and included both electricity and access to water for the 334 community members—services many had been without in the previous village.

"The water is much better now," Andah explains. "In our previous homes we had to use a bucket in a shallow well. Now we have water…that we can drink."

As village headman, re-elected by the people of Pulo every four years since he first took up the job in the 1980s, Andah knows the people of Pulo better than anyone. Things are still hard, he says. Once mostly a village of fishermen, the people have now turned largely to farming, as the new village site is more than a mile farther inland. Work is often difficult to come by, and most live only by what they earn from selling vegetables and fruit. As he sits in his living room, his young daughter plays on stacked bags of rice, provided by the government for those in Pulo who cannot make ends meet this season.

But these challenges, while real, are not new to the people of Aceh. While life is hard, the pace of the post-tsunami days has given way to the normal cycle of rural life. Looking down at his daughter, Andah offers this view of Aceh today.

"When the time comes, we will explain to the next generation what happened," he says. "We stopped talking now about the tsunami."

David Snyder is a photojournalist who has traveled to more than 30 countries with CRS.