Post-tsunami Aceh: It takes a woman to rebuild a village

After the Dec. 26 tsunami wave receded, Deyah Mapplam became a village of men.

Of 4,500 people, just 270 survived, and only one-third were women. And it is that gender imbalance, as much as the loss of homes and livelihoods, that remains a concern here.

For local men like Mohammad Nur, the solution is simple: to get remarried. But female survivors and Mr. Nur's new wife, Hadijah, say it's more complex than that. Women need to be involved in the planning process to rebuild Deyah Mapplam - or else the town may not be fit for habitation.

Hadijah, a 20-something who recently came to Deyah Mapplam to marry a local farmer here, says one need look no further than the temporary barracks where she and the village survivors now live. Clearly, they were not designed by a woman.

"The main thing is that the toilet is too far from our rooms, so if you have to go to toilet at midnight, it is too dark to go" and still feel safe, says Hadijah. "And there is no privacy inside the houses," she adds, noting that she and her new husband would like to have a baby.

Six months after the tsunami, the disproportionate toll on women is still being felt. According to some reports, the survivor ratio of males to females averages almost three to one. The imbalance has made it more difficult for women to have a voice in the planning and reconstruction of their communities - especially in a Muslim country where men tend to make major decisions. But women's activists and many Acehnese female survivors say that women's involvement is crucial to creating livable communities.

"Basic community planning decisions affect most of the aspects of family life," says Nicola Rounce, a project coordinator at UNIFEM, the UN's agency for women's development. "It affects the right to food, the right to sanitation, the right to have guardianship of children, and even access to marketplaces.

"We used to say [to Acehnese officials] that you're leaving out 50 percent of the population in the decision-making process," she says, but today's gender balance has made that situation even worse. "If only we could say [it was 50 percent] now," she says wryly.

The gender imbalance in Indonesia's Aceh Province is a phenomenon found in most of the dozen or so countries affected by the tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004. Reasons for the disproportionate death toll range from the fact that women are less likely than men to know how to swim to the fact that women were more likely to be carrying babies or holding elderly relatives when the flood hit. Traditional long dresses also made it difficult for women to flee.

But if the giant wave hit women hardest, cultural norms in a traditional province like Aceh are doing little to ease matters.

In a report issued by Flower Aceh, a nongovernmental organization based in Singapore, Suraiya Kamaruzzaman wrote: "Coordinators in charge of relief work are not gender sensitive. They think giving cooking utensils and washing detergent equals meeting women's needs."

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