Two paths back from tsunami

Three months after the tsunami took away three of his older children, his home, and his livelihood, Alamsyah is impatient to rebuild his life. He has hammered together a home of scrap planks of wood, sheets of tin, and now just wants to get back to work. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance - the largest humanitarian outpouring in history - mean nothing to a man who has lost everything except the will to live.

A few miles away, at a camp farther inland, Muammar Ma'aruf sits in a tent in the heat of the day, bouncing his five-month-old baby, Tasya, in a small hammock that hangs from a spring. He has faith that the government or some foreign charity group will provide housing for him and his wife and children, at least until they can find a home of their own.

On paper, these two men look similar. Each is married with two young children. Each led a comfortable working-class life before the tsunami: Alamsyah as a fish-seller and taxi driver, Muammar as a freelance graphic artist for the TV station.

Yet both have chosen completely different paths to rebuilding after the tsunami.

Muammar is relying on foreign charity, while Alamsyah is choosing to go it alone. The Monitor will follow them over the next year, offering a window into the challenges of two families as they struggle to rebuild both their homes and their lives.

The scale of the relief and reconstruction effort is enormous, but the scale of the problem appears, if anything, just as large. At latest report, some 533,000 individuals were displaced by the tsunami. Today, many of them are living in the cramped homes of host families; the rest are staying in temporary living centers or in homes they themselves constructed.

The UN and other humanitarian groups like the International Organization for Migration (IOM), along with the Indonesian government, are just now beginning the work of building temporary homes, part of a long-term plan to resettle nearly 720,000 people.

At present, the international community - 95 governments and humanitarian groups - has pledged or contributed $6.7 billion for the overall tsunami effort around the region. It's an unprecedented outpouring of charity - all of which will likely be needed to rebuild entire communities while simultaneously feeding and housing those who have lost everything, even their jobs.

Zuhrasafita has done it again. She has returned from the market with a pocket full of money, and no groceries. It's something that she has done off and on since the tsunami struck. Zuhrasafita says that being in a crowd reminds her of the tsunami, when crowds in her neighborhood of Punge Blangcut fled for their lives.

"We saw the wave on the horizon, like clouds, black against the sky," says the young mother, who had left her children, daughter Tasya and 3-year-old son Athafayath, with her brother at a neighborhood on higher ground. "I still have trauma from that day. There were so many people, and I was at the front of that crowd. Behind me, they all died." She pauses, wipes her eyes. "Now every time I go out into a crowd, I'm afraid people behind me will die again."

For the past few weeks, she and her small family have lived in this camp for displaced people in the village of Tingkeum. Most are rice farmers, and they spend their days wading out into ankle-deep water to pluck out weeds from the rice paddy. Little boys with sticks rush out to chase off wandering water buffalo - unless the little boys with sticks are looking after the water buffalo, in which case they don't mind if the animal stops for a quick snack.

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