Kamboja Street is so close to the sea that the tsunami all but levelled it a year ago. Most of the fishermen’s villas, with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns and verandahs, were shaved off the earth by the great cutthroat razor of water that stood over them and then sliced them from their foundations.
When, after three months, the Indonesians cleared the waist-high layer of mud, masonry, cars and corpses that covered Lampulo, the district of Banda Aceh where Kamboja Street lies, there was nothing left of many homes except a faint border of sea-chewed brick and the tiling on the ground floor.
A year on, the first replacement house has only just begun to be built, by the American charity Care. Tents still border the street; some residents have put up makeshift wooden dwellings. Electricity has been restored, but running water hasn’t, and households drink and wash courtesy of wells and giant yellow water tanks on corners, topped up by Oxfam.
If you hang out on Kamboja Street today, and get to know the people who live there, the weight of the obvious strikes you. Folk grumble mildly about the pace of reconstruction, but the bleakness of missing houses is a distraction from the infinitely greater pain of missing people. The empty spaces where buildings should be are easier to mend than the holes torn through families and hearts by sudden death on a scale seldom experienced by any community.
Kamboja Street begins by the brown, narrow Aceh River, which meets the sea less than a kilometre downstream. The mat of dead bodies and broken fishing boats that choked it after the tsunami is a horrible memory, and working boats line its banks again.
Turn off the embankment road — still unrepaired from where the tsunami took bites out of it — and you’re on the street. That’s Samsiah’s kiosk on the right, and the rebuilt metal repair workshop after it belongs to her too. Grass and weeds now grow over where the houses used to be, and the tarmac road is now a rough track.
You come to a little crossroads. On the left, some householders have pitched their grubby, sagging, once-white United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tents on the left, on the foundations of Yusran’s house. Five died there, four of them children. On the right, another tent is pitched where Mali’s house stood. At least nine people were killed there, two of them children. After Mali’s house, there are a couple of rough outlines of houses in the weeds, as if they were demolished decades ago.
The first one belonged to Mustafa, the mobile fishmonger. He was killed along with most of the rest of his family, including four children.
On the left is Samsiah’s house, not the original but a baroque hall of salvaged planks nailed together, like a giant beach hut, on the foundations of the old. Samsiah’s neighbour Harunabdullah, a tailor, lost his wife, Nuraini, three children and two nephews. His neighbour Khairiah and her son were also killed. Next door to the grassy outline of Khairiah’s house is the remnant of Hassan’s house — he died before the tsunami, which killed his widow and two children. Next along was Manaf’s house. Manaf survived, but his two teenage sons died. On the other side of the road the houses were thinner; there’s nothing there now.
And so it goes on, neighbour after neighbour. Next to Manaf, Iskander lost his wife and two children. Opposite, Hasriati died, along with five others. Iskander’s neighbour Mukhtar lost both parents; on the other side of the street, Muhammad Johan, a stallholder at the fish market, lost his wife and daughter, while his 67-year-old neighbour, Kamariah, is the sole survivor of her household. She returned from Jakarta to find eight grandchildren, two daughters and two sons-in-law dead.
Between Kamariah’s house and the home of Lely Abdullah at number 36, close to the end of the street, there used to be 10 dwellings. Twenty-six adults and six children from that little stretch of one street in Banda Aceh have been plucked away forever.
It was a young street, loud with children, with most of the houses built in the past couple of decades. Lely, a 46-year-old fisherman, watched the families grow around him. He moved to Kamboja Street in 1980, finished his house in 1992 after two years’ work and became rich enough to own four motorbikes.
”Before the tsunami, people were out on the street all day and all night, sitting and chatting,” he said. ”That’s what I liked about it. There were always children’s birthday parties, and when somebody got married they invited a local singer for the party. There were all sorts of pedlars. Especially selling toys for children, every day, every hour.
”The bicycle noodle guy used to come five times a day, and at night all the houses would turn on a light at the front. It was so busy before, with the fishmongers coming and going, the motorbikes, the cars. It’s silent now.”
Lely said he doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he doesn’t like to stay in the house in the evenings. He goes down to the fishing port and sits in the coffee shop till it’s time to sleep. His wife, Saudah, and one of his sons died in the tsunami. His neighbour on his left is his brother Hasyiny; his sister-in-law and two daughters were killed. Behind Lely’s house, at number 41, his sister Ainal Mardiah, her husband and four of their children died.
Lely’s two surviving daughters, Naula Astuti and Nurwardiah, and his 18-year-old engineering-student son Darman live with their ailing great aunt in a room in temporary barracks an hour away by motorbike. Lely desperately wants to bring the remnants of the family back to Kamboja, but can’t until he puts a roof on the house he has partly rebuilt with his own funds. He’s run out of money and isn’t sure whether or when Care will help.
The United States megacharity is ploughing huge resources into the area, but there are so many organisational layers between Care and individuals that even after The Guardian organised a meeting between senior officials and Lely, he wasn’t much the wiser.
Lely sits in the one covered room of the house, chain-smoking and obsessively taking out and putting back pictures of his family from a cigar box. In that, he is lucky: he was away when the tsunami struck. Most of his neighbours lost their photos.
”It’s too depressing to stay here alone in the evenings. If I get depressed, my son won’t like it. He worries about me.”
In the whole district, 44% of the population were killed. The Indonesian government and foreign aid organisations can do nothing to repopulate Kamboja Street. That’s up to the survivors, and they’ve begun. At 53, Muhammad Johan, for instance, has taken a new wife, Erawati, 20 years his junior; Harunabdullah has married his late wife’s young sister. Lely wants to bring his dead brother-in-law’s aged mother to live with him, even though she’s not a blood relative.
A hundred yards across open ground from Kamboja Street, next to a temporary mosque built by Pakistan, is a six-classroom temporary primary school built by Coca-Cola. It stands in for a school that had 260 pupils. Now there are only 60, and 30 of them come from outside the district.
You wouldn’t know to see or hear the boisterous kids in their crimson trousers and skirts and white shirts, with their SpongeBob SquarePants rucksacks, what they’ve lost.
”Some of the children have a new mother and a new father, as well as new brothers and sisters,” said one of the teachers. But the scars remain.
”So many of the children have lost parents that they’re reluctant to go to school and not interested in learning. Actually, we’d like counselling, but nobody comes. It used to be that we talked to them about the tsunami, about how it was God’s reminder to the people. We tried to encourage them not to be sad any more, just to take it as God’s lesson, which is what we believe … they looked so sad, and turned away from me, so I stopped telling them.”
The district will hold a commemoration in the dusty open space between the mosque and the school on Monday, the first anniversary of the tsunami. A cow will be slaughtered and there’ll be prayers.
Lely said he will not be doing anything special.
”I don’t want any monuments to those who were killed,” he said. ”I just want to finish the house. Then I’d like to have a small party and invite some of the orphans to the house, to pray for those who died.” — Guardian Unlimited Â