FEATURE: Lasting ripples

Saturday, December 26, marks five years since a deadly tsunami swept across coastlines in Asia and Africa, killing more than 250,000 people and displacing another 1.5 million.

The Indonesian province of Aceh was one of the hardest hit regions. There, more than 160,000 people lost their lives.

International response to the disaster was unprecedented, donors around the world pledging more than $US7 billion for the reconstruction effort in Indonesia alone.

With assistance from more than 100 international organisations, more than 140,000 thousand homes were built in Aceh.

Yet when Radio Australia visited the province recently, it found many of the houses remain empty, and at least 1,000 people are still living in supposedly temporary accommodation, waiting to be allocated a house.

Katie Hamann

Last Updated: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:27:00 +1100

It is almost impossible to imagine what the playful waters off the north-western tip of Sumatra looked like on the morning of December 24, 2004, when colossal walls of ocean slammed into Aceh's coast.

Five years on the damage is still evident, stretching for hundreds of kilometres.

In many places the landscape has been altered forever.

Ibu Ade remembers waves taller than the coconut palms. She was one of the few people in her West Aceh village to survive. Her mother and sister were killed but she managed to save her son.

They fled to her husband's village nearby, where, eventually, the Spanish Red Cross built her family a neat, concrete home.

Garden

It stands barely 500 metres from the ocean but Ade says she is not afraid. She likes its new tiles and garden. And now they have much more space.

But all around, other houses like hers stand empty.

Ade says some of these houses belong to orphaned children. She hopes that one day they will return with children of their own.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of homes built for tsunami victims remain unoccupied.

Simon Field, head of the UNDP Aceh mission, says: "A number of people decided that they did not want to live in that location, near the coast, and have relocated.

"But they wanted to access their right and their entitlement to get a house from the reconstruction process and they are in the process of renting their house."

Widows

He says as well as orphans, widows received homes, but many have since remarried and moved from their villages. And, he concedes, some homes were built for the dead.

"Then there are definitely cases where houses were built when most likely the person and all members of the family had passed away in the tsunami."

While thousands of houses lie empty across the province, on the outskirts of the capital, Banda Aceh, several hundred families are still without permanent accommodation.

Ani has lived at Barak Bakoi, with her husband and four children for nearly five years. As many as 500 people are packed into the camp, a series of long wooden halls. Each family has one room divided by a thin wall.

She says sanitation is a constant issue. And sometimes there is no running water.

Broken

We asked, what happened to your home or your village in the tsunami?

"Broken," says Ani. "My village broken, including my house. But rented house, not mine."

This is the problem many faced.

In the months and years following the tsunami, priority was given to house owners and land owners; a task made almost impossible because of the destruction of records of land titles and the loss of physical land.

Simon Field says it was only in 2007 that the Indonesian reconstruction agency began focusing on housing solutions for renters and illegal squatters, who also lost their homes.

Mr Field says: "The provincial government has a program to ensure all poor households have a house within three years.

"That's not just tsunami-affected households or conflict-affected households, but anyone who the province or district government has identified as a poor household, they will be given a government-sponsored house."

Mr Field says the scale of the disaster in Aceh was unprecedented and the experience has inspired new approaches to delivering relief.

Following earthquakes in Yogjakarta in 2006 and Padang this year, the Indonesian government and aid agencies have been experimenting with direct cash handouts - enabling the homeless to build the houses they want, where they want.