Meulaboh, Indonesia

silter

10/26/2007

Michael Pitt has sent us the following article, written by friends who had visited Sumatra....

In March this year we were able to go and visit a friend who is working for Tear Fund in Meulaboh on the tsunami coast in Banda Aceh in Indonesia.

It took us two days to get there which shows that even by plane it is not a straightforward journey. We flew from England to Singapore and from there to Medan in Sumatra. After an overnight stop in Medan we took another small plane over the mountains to Meulaboh. As we flew in to Meulaboh we were able to see quite clearly the water from the tsunami which is still trapped inland alongside houses and roads.

Meulaboh is not a town that tourists go to very much, but it has got used to the numbers of workers and visitors that the aid projects have introduced since the tsunami. The town sits alongside a river opening on to an endless beach where the waves roll in from the Indian Ocean. You need to be brave to go out into the sea here as the water is always rough and there are fearsome currents. However, the beach is a place for walking and socialising for locals and visitors alike.

As soon as we arrived we were taken to the beach which stretched out into the horizon. We were told that the tsunami wave came in at the height of the palm trees. We could see breaks in the palm tree lines where the tsunami had hit.

First impressions of Meulaboh now are of a bustling well-organised town. The shops and cafes were busy, the traffic whirled around as in any town and the mosques and government buildings were smartly decorated. It is not a disaster scene nor is it particularly poor.

However, the effects of the tsunami are still very clear if you leave the centre of the town and go to the headland which is surrounded on three sides by water. Here there is still total devastation. One large government building seemed to be intact and it was only as we got closer that we could see that the whole of the inside of the building had been ripped out - it was an empty shell. The owners of some properties have marked the plots as theirs with small markers. It has been generally true that the local people seem to want to rebuild in the same places as they have always lived.

We were taken to see the projects with which Tear Fund has been involved. Like many of the aid organisations they have been involved with rebuilding houses. As you travel around the area you can tell which organisation have built which houses by the colour of the roofs. The new houses stretch along the road which runs along the coast both north and south. The road itself was washed away in many places, but it has been rebuilt by money from the Japanese government.

Tear Fund has helped to rebuild a government nursing college. We were told that the only part of the smart new complex which was pre tsunami was the porch. The principal’s wife climbed on to the porch roof in the tsunami and while there she gave birth to her child. It is a sad fact that most of the people who perished in the tsunami in Meulaboh were women and children because they never learned to swim.

We visited a boat building project where many new boats were being built in traditional style to enable fishermen to rebuild their livelihoods. New shops are also being built so that people who lost their businesses can begin again.

We were taken to see a mural that local people had painted on a wall in the town. It was beginning to fade, but it was a series of pictures showing the wave coming, the destruction it caused, the arrival of all the aid organisations and the rebuilding of the town.

We were privileged to join a team working in health promotion in schools in the villages north of Meulaboh. They try to make basic health care fun for primary school children. The school we visited seemed well ordered though the premises and some of the children were unkempt. The staff and children were really pleased to see us and made us very welcome. Many of these children had lost younger brothers and sisters in the tsunami.

There are huge numbers of NGOs working in this region. Other projects we heard about were the desalination of agricultural land, teaching children to deal with trauma through play activities, setting up restaurants to enable the women to work and there will be many others that we do not know about.

It seems likely that the foreign aid workers will start pulling out from this region fairly soon as the basic infrastructure is certainly back in place. The long term prospects for the region are more uncertain as earthquakes continue to happen.