A Look Back: Four Years After the Tsunami

By David Snyder

In a world where news moves in real time, anniversaries often pass with little notice, or go unnoticed altogether. So it may be this year on December 26, when the fourth anniversary of the 2004 tsunami that struck Asia comes to pass.

For those who survived the tsunami, and those who saw its aftermath, the date remains one to remember. As a writer and photographer for Catholic Relief Services, I arrived in Asia within days of the disaster, and spent nearly a month documenting the relief operations that followed.

While the images of destruction—on a scale I had never before experienced—remain, many of my memories from those days are of people I spoke with as they picked through the debris of their former lives. I recall writing in my journal at the time that every survivor had a miracle story to tell—a home that was the only one of dozens to survive the wave or an entire family away at an inland church for a christening when their seaside home was destroyed. The incredible became truly commonplace.

But as with all such disasters, the adrenaline that sustained survivors in the weeks immediately following the catastrophe gave way to disbelief, grief and despair. I left, exhausted, when millions of people across Asia were just beginning to come to terms with the enormity of their loss.

New Community Rises

The scale of the crisis brought a response of equal proportion from agencies like CRS. Five months after the tsunami, I returned to India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia's Banda Aceh region, to areas that had been devastated by the tsunami. Near the town of Meulaboh, I spent a week with a family as they worked to rebuild with CRS' help. They were pouring concrete walls and spending hours each day nailing a shelter together as their kids played around them.

I was amazed at the resiliency I saw then, and again when I returned one year later, as families began moving into the permanent homes provided for them by CRS. Though the trauma of the tsunami was still evident in the tears of those who recounted loved ones lost, the transition had begun.

Everywhere I met with people who had a permanent roof over their heads for the first time in a year. Where broken trees and slabs of destroyed homes had lain, new communities stood. Roads, undermined by the force of the water or simply destroyed by the debris it bore, were repaved and functional. Clinics, schools and community centers rose up from the rubble.

Now, nearly four years after the tsunami, I am back in Meulaboh. Though I work often in areas of conflict or natural disaster, it is a rare chance to see, year to year, the recovery of a country as I have witnessed in Indonesia. That change has been remarkable.

Everywhere I went this week, I met with people who are moving on with their lives. Whole villages have been completely rebuilt. In all, CRS will build 3,980 permanent homes, providing shelter for nearly 20,000 people.

Though memories of those terrible days will likely always remain, villagers I met all week spoke of the tsunami in distant terms. Children born in the years after the tsunami scrambled about—blissfully unaware of the horrors their older brothers and sisters may still remember.

And while the physical manifestations of recovery are most visible in Meulaboh, what strikes me most on this trip back is the feeling that pervades the area. The buzz of my previous visits, the energy of relief and development, has yielded to an unfamiliar feeling for me when it comes to Indonesia: what it must have been like here before December 26, 2004.

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