Aceh works to recover jobs washed away

The rain is falling furiously on the tin roof of Alamsyah's scrap-wood house. He is quiet, staring out a window, his mind racing in a hundred directions.

What does he do if the nearby river overflows its banks? Will he lose everything he has, again? Why is the reconstruction happening so slowly? How will he feed his family?

Sometimes, unavoidably, conversation in his small home turns to his three older children, who were lost in the tsunami of Dec. 26.

It is at these times that Alamsyah picks up his hammer and his saw, and throws himself into work - building neighbors' houses out of scrap, and hammering together a handcart for selling coffee. And sometimes, even though he knows he won't earn money, he just gets into his becak - a motorcycle rickshaw - and rides.

After an hour and a half, he has had just two passengers, earning 3,000 rupiah, or 32 cents. He smiles. "I should move to America. The economy here is very bad."

While many people here are still struggling to secure adequate shelter, the main concern has shifted to finding work. For ordinary Acehnese like Alamsyah, the needs are much greater than just getting paid daily wages for clearing rubble or building new shelters. Long-term livelihoods require the recreation of an entire society - housing, roads, markets, jobs, schools, hospitals, everything - almost from scratch.

"If you don't build livelihoods into the community, that community will not survive," says Paul Dillon, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, an aid group working in Banda Aceh.

But this type of work is proving more difficult than handing out aid. "The people of Aceh saw how quickly things moved in the emergency response phase, and now things are moving much more slowly," says Mr. Dillon. "We have to be very careful in managing those expectations."

Throughout Aceh, there are unmistakable signs of economic activity, if not an actual recovery. In every neighborhood, large homes are being rebuilt by rich survivors; in every market, shops are being reopened, some of them informal stalls set up on sidewalks under tents, selling everything from fruits and vegetables to the latest fashions from Jakarta and Hong Kong.

But the main driver of the economy has shifted. Before, Aceh was built around fishing. Now that industry has been devastated, not just by the death of entire fishing villages, but also by tens, even hundreds of thousands of customers. And for the next few years or so, the main driver of the economy will be foreign aid, for good or ill.

To provide a window into the struggles of those starting over after the tsunami, the Monitor is following two families in Banda Aceh - both of which have lost their homes, and which are taking different paths toward their recovery - to see whether their lives improve. This is the second part of this series.

Both of our families, headed by Alamsyah and Muammar Ma'aruf, respectively, have moved into new homes. Alamsyah struck out on his own and rebuilt; Muammar Ma'aruf went through an aid agency which put a roof over his head. The two men's different approaches are playing out again in their hunt for jobs.

At his small wooden home, hammered together on his dead brother's land in the fishing village of Lampulo, Alamsyah is not waiting for the aid community to bring jobs. After spending months pouring his efforts into rebuilding his broken-down becak, or rickshaw, he has realized that there isn't any money in becak-driving anymore. Instead, he has become a local handyman of sorts, helping friends to build their own homes from pieces of debris found in former wealthy neighborhoods.

Occasionally, people pay him, as did a family friend who decided to build a new mechanic's shop just down the road. For three days, Alamsyah earned 100,000 rupiah (roughly $11) to add the finishing touches - staircases, window frames - with nothing but chisel, hammer, and saw.

Shops like this one are the most obvious signs of economic activity in Banda Aceh, depending more on the pluck of an entrepreneur or a deep-pocketed businessman than on relief dollars from abroad. Longer-term projects - from highways and electrical grids to tens of thousands of homes - are just getting started.

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