Acehnese villagers struggle on

By Rachel Harvey BBC, Lampuuk, Aceh

Khairan says she is one of only 35 women to have survived

He was still on the beach when he saw the first of the waves coming, but his knowledge of the sea and quick wits kept him alive.

He clung to a plank of wood and used the momentum of the water to steer. When he finally fell off he managed to reach a coconut tree and climbed up to safety.

Mr Abdullah is now a co-ordinator for the community in Lampuuk, one of many villages on the western coast of Indonesia's Aceh province to be almost completely decimated by last year's earthquake and tsunami.

He liaises with the various international and local aid agencies who have come to help.

He was also one of the people selected to speak to former US Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior when they visited the area in February.

"I said to Mr Clinton, there used to be 6,000 people living here... there are less than 1,000 of us left," Mr Abdullah said.

"But we want to rebuild our houses exactly where they were, and we need help for that. Also we need education facilities, we need money to rebuild, as we have no capital, and we want a tsunami detector."

Few women

Slowly people are coming back to reclaim their land in Lampuuk.

Now I don't have any friends left here - they were all killed Ansar

Clusters of tents have been pitched close to the mosque, and water is brought in by truck and stored in a big vat.

Twenty-year-old Khairan spends much of her time cooking. Far fewer women than men survived in Lampuuk - Khairan says there are only 35 women now - and everyone pitches in to help each other out.

Khairan lost her one-year-old son in the tsunami, but her husband, a lorry driver who was away at the time, is still alive.

Khairan describes Lampuuk before the tsunami as being a beautiful place to live.

The valley is surrounded by rolling green hills, where separatist rebels, known by their Indonesian acronym Gam, have their hideouts.

Khairan says that in the days immediately after the tsunami, the rebels came to help.

"They came down and brought us rice, and they went into town and brought us back medicines," she said. "But after the fifth day the Indonesian soldiers came so now Gam are too frightened to come back."

Imran Abdullah liaises with aid agencies helping in Lampuuk

These days Indonesian soldiers regularly patrol Lampuuk and the surrounding areas, fanning out across the open wasteland armed with automatic rifles.

But their presence has not put Khairan off moving back to the village permanently.

"At first I just wanted to build a shack here. But now some friends say they'll help us build a semi-permanent house, exactly the same size as our old one," she said.

Rebuilding

Khairan says she is willing to stay in her tent until the new house is ready. But others have already had enough of living under canvas.

Spurred on by Acehnese music, 18-year-old Ansar and his father are putting a few finishing touches to the shack they have built on the foundations of the old family home.

It has taken them three weeks to build the simple shelter out of reclaimed wood they picked up amongst the wreckage which surrounds them.

Ansar was fortunate to survive the tsunami. He was carried up the valley on a torrent of water. He made it to a village on higher ground, and a few days later he found his father, but his mother and all his friends were dead.

"Before [the tsunami] I used to like watching TV, hanging out with my friends, watching volleyball or playing football," he said.

"But now I don't have any friends left here - they were all killed. At school, I'm the only person in my class who survived from this village."

Nowadays, if Ansar wants company his own age, he has to go to other villages.

But despite this, he is anxious to stay in Lampuuk.

"I want to build my own house here one day," he said. "I will have to go to work somewhere else, but I want to live in Lampuuk."

That seems to be the prevailing sentiment here. Imran Abdullah has a clear idea of what the community needs next as it tries to get back on its feet.

"For the electricity generator we need gasoline, and for that we need money, but we don't have any," he said.

"Secondly, we need different food... we spend all day under the sun so we need some fruit. Thirdly, there are about 15 orphans here, and I have to take them to school each day but I only have a motorbike. So it would be good to have some help with that."

There is no shortage of motivation among the survivors of Lampuuk. But there are so few people.

Those that are left have lost everything - homes, livelihoods, families.

Lampuuk's future still looks precarious, but people here are still determined to try to make a go of it.

E-mail this to a friend

Printable version