6 months post Tsunami

It’s 8.30am here, 26th June 2005, 6 months ago at this time there was no-one in Banda Aceh who would have been sitting at their computer typing e-mails. The city was in a state of panic, families had already been separated, houses destroyed and lives lost. It is to the credit of the aid agencies that the number of casualties in the wake of the disaster were much much less than were predicted, with no major disease outbreaks and primary aid in the form of food, water and shelter delivered over a wide area. Many families have been reunited, even now, relatives are being located in far apart refugee camps. You can understand how hard it must be to find your relatives if you were separated in the panic and then made your way to refugee camps that are far apart, with no money for travel and no idea of a number to call. Even we had difficulty finding some of our staff, with the aid of money and transport it took three days to find someone.

Yesterday I went down to Ulee Lhuee, which is one of the areas of Banda Aceh right next to the sea – the one with the Mosque still standing which I think has been on TV. There was a commemorative event to thank volunteers for their efforts over the last six months. It had been a while since I had been to that area. Still there are houses which are still standing but have been very damaged and uninhabitable, but all the debris has been cleared and some of the life of the area is coming back, with tents and wooden houses being constructed. People who lived there and survived by some stroke of luck, are returning to claim their land. There are small stalls for selling snacks and drinks and the fishermen are going back to their routine work of fishing. We still feel earthquakes, we had one two nights ago, and I can imagine the fear that people who experienced the earthquake and Tsunami 6 months ago must feel.

Now that people made homeless mostly have some sort of temporary building to live in and have regular food supplies, attention is focusing on getting their livelihood back and building them a permanent house. The huge amounts of materials required to build and repair the approximately 200,000 houses needed is of course a big concern for me and my team and the other conservation and environment focuses organizations here. Just last week, we were involved in running a ‘green conference’ which showcased new technology and innovative ideas for alternative designs and materials for reconstruction. It is estimated that to meet just the timber needs for these houses and the 2,400 boats to be built will need 3million m3 of logs, which would mean clear felling 100,000ha of tropical rainforest. The timber industry in Aceh has been severely affected by the ongoing conflict between GAM and the Indonesian Army. This means that no logging concessions operate and do not have management plans which would allow sustainable harvesting of the timber. Illegal logging was rife before the Tsunami and has quickly started again to feed the demand for timber in Aceh. We are now working with the NGOs and UN to find short term supplies of legal and sustainably sourced wood for reconstruction whilst trying to establish long term community based forest harvesting. This isn’t an easy job, when agencies are eager to get their houses built and are offered wood from local sources. But, the forests which this wood comes form are on steep slopes directly above the communities the agencies are trying to help. Cutting the forest will mean that next year, the communities will be suffering from landslides, flooded rivers and unproductive fish ponds because they have been inundated with top soil.

One of our projects is to rebuild 54 houses and hopefully a Mosque and school in one village about 3 hours from here in Lamno. The area where their village was is now part of the sea, so they are moving further inland. We will use this as an opportunity to find environmental friendly ways to build houses and to show how you can source sustainable timber. We are considering using coconut wood with mud and coconut fibre bricks, however, the village used to have concrete framed brick houses and so we have a lot of work to do to convince them that these houses will be just a good. We have also provided hand tractors, seeds, agricultural tools and training to so that they can plant crops this season. Once we have helped them back on their feet, living in their village and farming their land, we will engage them in monitoring and identifying illegal logging happening close to their village and build their confidence and capacity to protect the forest near their village. This is how we are choosing all the villages we will work with, and have now identified about 25 villages we will work with over the next 3 years.

It is now school holidays, but we will continue to employ the volunteer teachers that we have provided to schools in Aceh Jaya over the holiday to work with our team to develop an environmental and natural disaster awareness programme for them to include in the curriculum next year. We have committed to keeping the 18 teachers on for one more year, paying them about 50 pounds a month to help the schools to continue to provide classes. The storms here in the last few weeks have destroyed most of the tents that were put up for the schools and now more solid structures need to be put up ready for next term.

The crocodiles which we had reports of moving nearer to a village and injuring someone, when we went to do an assessment of the threat and how we can protect the crocodiles and the people, they have moved away, probably dispersed to other places. There are still reports of elephants coming near to villages and sometimes destroying crops and houses, so we are going to start up an assessment team to work with the communities to find some solution. This will be integrated into our agroforestry project, so that we can try to plant crops that elephants don’t like such as chili, and not crops thet do like such as oil palm and bananas, between the forest and the village as a natural protection.