12/30/2005
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“The wave was like a dark blue carpet, twenty meters high, that unrolled along
the road swallowing palm trees, people, cars...I could see it in my rear-view
mirror and I was standing on the accelerator, with my foot flat down, pushing
on my knee with my left hand, as far down as possible. That kind of terror cannot
be described”. These words, spoken by Ipan, a businessman from Banda Aceh, give
an idea of what it must have been like facing that wall of water in the province
closest to the epicenter of the quake: Aceh, in the northern part of the island
of Sumatra, Indonesia.
Like Hiroshima. “If you take a jeep and travel north from Meulaboh, the scene is very similar
to, or at least is what I imagine Hiroshima looked like on August 10th 1945, the
day after the attack”, Frank Butler, a doctor who has completed six months of
volunteer work with an Indonesian NGO in Western Sumatra, says to PeaceReporter. “I think we are behind in that area; in six months I have seen about two UN
officials doing surveys for the rebuilding efforts. They have no clear idea of
how to structure the activity”, adds Butler, who has started a blog on his experience
as a volunteer in Asia.
“It was impossible to work any faster”, retorts another US American, Barbara Jenina, public relations spokeswoman for the Brr, the Indonesian committee coordinating rebuilding efforts. “The wave swept away everything for dozens of kilometers, lowered the ground level, ate away the coastline for hundreds of meters. It took us until the beginning of October to complete a sort of land and real estate register, village by village; the virgin forest has reclaimed the land where the villages used to be, it will take years.” The Brr was founded 6 months ago by the Indonesian government to coordinate the activities of the humanitarian organizations in the area, to avoid overlapping. It received 7 million US dollars from the US government as a first donation.
Four billion in six years. According to official data provided by Ocha and Echo (the UN and EU offices
for the coordination of humanitarian efforts), Aceh alone should receive 4 billion
dollars between now and 2010. So far 775 million of these funds have been spent,
mostly for emergency activities such as clearing debris, clearing irrigation channels
or purifying fields from the salt water, through the “cash for work” system with
which the victims of the quake were paid to begin living again. As of September
the rebuilding efforts have begun: 80 thousand homes are to be built for the Brr.
So far 16 thousand have been built, 4 thousand in the capital alone, where there
were 120 thousand victims for 270 thousand inhabitants. Rebuilding efforts began
also for thousands of schools and clinics. Hundreds of NGOs have descended on
Banda Aceh hoping for part of the funds; there were one hundred at the end of
July with the Brr, 8 months after the tragedy. PeaceReporter counted 260 at the beginning of November, but more recently correspondents have
spoken of more than 300. As time passes and the emergency fades into the past,
the number of NGOs is rising: how is that possible? “The real money is coming
in now: with the rebuilding efforts the UN and national agencies like ours set
aside funds to open building sites. So far we have been been very careful in how
we have spent the money, which is why only a small amount has been used”, explains
Pino Antuzzi of Cooperazione Italiana, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Many
NGOs arrived here without really being aware of the situation, with no experience
of rebuilding efforts. Without naming names, when I see organizations that provide
medical aid and came for the emergency, staying now to rebuild schools, I can’t
help but wonder if they are staying to get part of the funds”. “The truth is that
too much money is flowing in” says a member of an Italian NGO which has been
providing aid to disabled people for ten years now in Indonesia, and who asked
us to withhold her name.
Too much dough. The arrival of the Buleh (albinos, in Bahasa, meaning ‘white man’) has brought an
amount of money never before seen in a province that was isolated for thirty years
from the rest of the world by a creeping conflict between the Gam independence
fighters and Jakarta. According to data provided by the Undp, the UN agency for
development, the average Acehnese salary was about 80 dollars a month. “Now most
of them earn between 250 and 300 dollars a month, and they won’t accept a job
under that amount”, Francesca Iacona, project supervisor for the Milanese NGO
Alisei in the countries struck by the tsunami, explains to PeaceReporter. “Rents are sky-high: the UN buleh pay, without batting an eyelash, ten times
what the locals would pay. A house in our East Zone, Sigli, rents for about 10
thousand dollars a year: building it would cost twice as much. Many homeowners
have moved to Jakarta and are living off the rent income.”
printsend
Rebuilding in Banda Aceh; a mountain of funds has gone unused
Written for PeaceReporter by
Gianluca Ursini
“The wave was like a dark blue carpet, twenty meters high, that unrolled along
the road swallowing palm trees, people, cars...I could see it in my rear-view
mirror and I was standing on the accelerator, with my foot flat down, pushing
on my knee with my left hand, as far down as possible. That kind of terror cannot
be described”. These words, spoken by Ipan, a businessman from Banda Aceh, give
an idea of what it must have been like facing that wall of water in the province
closest to the epicenter of the quake: Aceh, in the northern part of the island
of Sumatra, Indonesia. In this province alone 126 thousand have been confirmed dead, more than 90 thousand
are missing. Half a million people took refuge with relatives, in the tents of
the UNHCR or in the barracks of the Red Cross and Crescent. One year after the
tragedy, 250 thousand people are still homeless. The situation on the western
coast is worse, in some cases, where the epicenter of the quake was closest; more
than 100 kilometers south of Banda Aceh, towards the ruins of Calang and Meulaboh,
no roads are left, no public health buildings are left and it is as yet unsure
whether many villages where 90 per cent of the population died will be rebuilt.
Like Hiroshima. “If you take a jeep and travel north from Meulaboh, the scene is very similar
to, or at least is what I imagine Hiroshima looked like on August 10th 1945, the
day after the attack”, Frank Butler, a doctor who has completed six months of
volunteer work with an Indonesian NGO in Western Sumatra, says to PeaceReporter. “I think we are behind in that area; in six months I have seen about two UN
officials doing surveys for the rebuilding efforts. They have no clear idea of
how to structure the activity”, adds Butler, who has started a blog on his experience
as a volunteer in Asia.
“It was impossible to work any faster”, retorts another US American, Barbara Jenina, public relations spokeswoman for the Brr, the Indonesian committee coordinating rebuilding efforts. “The wave swept away everything for dozens of kilometers, lowered the ground level, ate away the coastline for hundreds of meters. It took us until the beginning of October to complete a sort of land and real estate register, village by village; the virgin forest has reclaimed the land where the villages used to be, it will take years.” The Brr was founded 6 months ago by the Indonesian government to coordinate the activities of the humanitarian organizations in the area, to avoid overlapping. It received 7 million US dollars from the US government as a first donation.
Frank Vellenga is a Dutch movie director who made a documentary for public TV
that was shown on December 15th. “I was only interested in showing the life of normal people in the villages
near Calang, where only 1 in 10 survived”, he explained to PeaceReporter. “Things are moving very slowly there, especially when it comes to understanding
who should rebuild what where. It is hard to take a real census of the survivors,
decide who should receive a house, and on what land; the land is not the same
as it was.”
Four billion in six years. According to official data provided by Ocha and Echo (the UN and EU offices
for the coordination of humanitarian efforts), Aceh alone should receive 4 billion
dollars between now and 2010. So far 775 million of these funds have been spent,
mostly for emergency activities such as clearing debris, clearing irrigation channels
or purifying fields from the salt water, through the “cash for work” system with
which the victims of the quake were paid to begin living again. As of September
the rebuilding efforts have begun: 80 thousand homes are to be built for the Brr.
So far 16 thousand have been built, 4 thousand in the capital alone, where there
were 120 thousand victims for 270 thousand inhabitants. Rebuilding efforts began
also for thousands of schools and clinics. Hundreds of NGOs have descended on
Banda Aceh hoping for part of the funds; there were one hundred at the end of
July with the Brr, 8 months after the tragedy. PeaceReporter counted 260 at the beginning of November, but more recently correspondents have
spoken of more than 300. As time passes and the emergency fades into the past,
the number of NGOs is rising: how is that possible? “The real money is coming
in now: with the rebuilding efforts the UN and national agencies like ours set
aside funds to open building sites. So far we have been been very careful in how
we have spent the money, which is why only a small amount has been used”, explains
Pino Antuzzi of Cooperazione Italiana, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Many
NGOs arrived here without really being aware of the situation, with no experience
of rebuilding efforts. Without naming names, when I see organizations that provide
medical aid and came for the emergency, staying now to rebuild schools, I can’t
help but wonder if they are staying to get part of the funds”. “The truth is that
too much money is flowing in” says a member of an Italian NGO which has been
providing aid to disabled people for ten years now in Indonesia, and who asked
us to withhold her name.Too much dough. The arrival of the Buleh (albinos, in Bahasa, meaning ‘white man’) has brought an
amount of money never before seen in a province that was isolated for thirty years
from the rest of the world by a creeping conflict between the Gam independence
fighters and Jakarta. According to data provided by the Undp, the UN agency for
development, the average Acehnese salary was about 80 dollars a month. “Now most
of them earn between 250 and 300 dollars a month, and they won’t accept a job
under that amount”, Francesca Iacona, project supervisor for the Milanese NGO
Alisei in the countries struck by the tsunami, explains to PeaceReporter. “Rents are sky-high: the UN buleh pay, without batting an eyelash, ten times
what the locals would pay. A house in our East Zone, Sigli, rents for about 10
thousand dollars a year: building it would cost twice as much. Many homeowners
have moved to Jakarta and are living off the rent income.”“We have decided not to pay our laborers like the buleh do: we pay a fourth what
Oxfam or Save the Children do”, explains Budi, of the German ONG ‘Uplink’, in
Indonesia. The national coordinator of this NGO, which works with micro credit
loans to re-start businesses, said to PeaceReporter that he “can’t even imagine how much a white man who works for the UNDP must
earn”. When pushed to guess an amount, he says “I don’t know, it must be a lot,
say 900 dollars”. The Italian journalists are embarrassed; they don’t know whether
to tell him that according to official sources, a UN project employee on his first
mission after graduating from college (a junior-level employee), earns about 4
thousand dollars a month in take-home pay.
Alleyways and puddles. PeaceReporter went to see for ourselves how the people in the villages in the hardest-hit
areas live, on the west coast south of Lamno, on the (ex) road to Calangs. In
a single day, in the three villages we visited, we heard the same story: we interviewed
dozens of people and most of them said that in the first months they saw many
UN officials, but then nobody came for ten months. “In November people came from
our Civil Defence Guard”, says Adani, an elder of the village of Bahaja, in the
district of Lamno, “to make a survey and ask us where to rebuild. They promised
us finished houses by February. We are waiting.” It is raining hard and the wood
huts where the survivors of Bahaja (230 of the original 900) are living do not
seem to be either warm or dry. The alleys are muddy and it is hard to walk, slipping
and sliding among the puddles. To get there from Lamno, we had to use an impossible
goat-track, all potholed, a strip of mud in the rain. The road is interrupted
where a bridge was swept away. Now there is an ingenious ferry made of floats
tied together and covered with wooden planks. “The Americans will rebuild the
bridge too, no problem” says Adani trustfully.
Thanksgiving Party. Meanwhile in Banda Aceh preparations are underway for Friday evening. The international
community, meaning the Europeans and US Americans, want to relax after a tiring
week in the refugee camps. The main attraction for the evening is the US Thanksgiving
celebration at the UN World Food Program main offices in Jalan General Sudirman.
The World Food Program bar is the most popular among the buleh in Banda, as it
is one of the few places where they give you alcohol on the sly. This scandalizes
the Acehnese mullahs; Sharia has been in effect here for three years and the sale
of alcohol is punishable with a jail term. But the buleh can do anything, provided
they keep on bringing money, lots of money.
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