Muhammad Dahlan’s garden has become a microcosm of Nusa’s post-tsunami recovery efforts. Six weeks ago it was a wasteland of mud, rubble and tree trunks. Now it is a thriving vegetable patch, with sweet potato, maize, chilli and pumpkin plants growing so rapidly they threaten to become entangled in each other.
”It hasn’t been easy and it will still be at least another six weeks until I can harvest anything,” he said, sitting on his veranda — which was his living room until last year’s Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami ripped away two of the four walls. ”But at least I’ve started doing something. We shouldn’t just be sitting around; we should be working every day.”
Such creativity can be found all over Nusa, a village about 10km south-west of the city of Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra island in Indonesia.
Four of Dahlan’s friends have joined him in his project and many others have started small enterprises.
Muhammad Yassin and his wife, who were given custody of one of the two televisions donated to the village, as their house suffered only minor damage, have opened a cake stall. ”I don’t actually do any baking, but we provide the location and I sit here all day selling the goods,” Mrs Yassin said. Most items sell for 300 rupiah, of which Mrs Yassin keeps 50 rupiah.
”It’s a good system,” said Zahra (20) who supplies the stall with 50 coconut pancake rolls and 100 variously flavoured doughnuts daily. ”We need to make some money and this is a good location as people gather here.”
Zahra wakes at 5.30am with her mother, Juariah, to cook the food in the basic kitchen of their refugee ”barracks” — the five wooden longhouses that are home to 400 villagers. ”We probably make about 20 000 ($2) to 25 000 rupiah profit a day,” she said. ”My younger sister is still at school and we have to pay her [fees].”
The villagers’ determination to rebuild their lives as quickly as possible has impressed Saiful Amri, the Oxfam community development officer responsible for the aid agency’s projects in the area.
”Nusa could be an example for the whole district. I would say 70% of the villagers are showing initiative and enthusiasm to move on. In most other places I go, the figure is about 10 to 15%.
”Perhaps in other places they’re still traumatised, but it’s clear that the people of Nusa want to become self-sufficient.”
The livelihood projects are possible thanks to savings from a cash-for-work scheme run throughout the Greater Aceh district by Mercy Corps. Villagers were given a daily wage of 35 000 rupiah to take part in a massive clean-up operation of the village and surrounding fields.
For a village where a third of the houses were wiped out, almost another third suffered significant damage and tonnes of debris was dumped on it from surrounding areas, Nusa is looking pretty tidy.
The streets and drains are clean, people are slowly starting to repair their homes and plant trees, and the rubble that can be recycled has been stacked neatly into different piles. The improvement has undoubtedly lifted people’s spirits. ”Very few people are still outwardly traumatised,” said Abdul Kadir, who moved back into his damaged house a few weeks ago. ”We didn’t feel confident enough to return before then, but now anyone who can has moved into what remains of their homes.”
Zainun Saad, who is acting as the village chief, estimates that about 80 families are now living in their own homes. ”That’s about twice as many as immediately after the tsunami,” he said.
Now, after two months of unexplained bureaucratic delays, the people who were forced to flee their homes are about to start receiving a 3 000 rupiah daily food allowance, known as jadup.
Two families in Nusa are also celebrating the village’s first post-tsunami births. Maya Fifa gave birth to a daughter on May 8, but she and her husband have not yet agreed on a name, so the child is being called Putri, which means daughter. Saidul, a boy, was born 12 days later to Faridal Hanung and her husband, Syawan.
Many villagers, though, feel uneasy because they do not see how they are going to find long-term work. Mercy Corps’s cash-for-work scheme ended last week, except for a couple of well construction projects. The villagers have no means to plough their rice fields to prepare for the August planting season, the furniture factory where most of the 30% of men who are not farmers worked is not reopening, and red tape has delayed the government’s main reconstruction programmes for a further three to five months.
Saiful, a villager enjoying a drink in the local coffee shop, said: ”We don’t want to become dependent on aid, but there’s not much alternative at present.”
A village committee has submitted at least four proposals to Mercy Corps for livelihood funding, but the agency is struggling to process its applications.
”We’ve had to rewrite our proposal several times to make sure it meets Mercy’s criteria,” explained Subarni, the head of the Nusa farming subcommittee. ”For example, Mercy will not give us chemical fertiliser, so we’ve had to rewrite, asking for natural products.” He has applied for equipment, fertiliser and seeds for 120 families. The other proposals are for 50 women to restart making the sweet potato crisps for which the village is famous, for the former furniture company employees to start a carpentry business and for the 20 members of a performing arts troupe who want to replace the musical instruments they lost in the tsunami.
”We’re working through them all as fast as we can,” said Mercy Corps’s Sugeng Maskat. ”Hopefully it won’t be more than a couple of weeks.” – Guardian Unlimited Â