New jobs, homes boost two Banda Aceh families

By the time the airplane touches down, an hour late, the afternoon skies have faded to a smudge of purple cloud. In the outdoor waiting area, a dozen noses press against a wire fence, their voices burbling with excitement. "That's her plane! Mom! Mom!" cries one boy.

The boy's father, Muammar Maaruf, smiles. He has brought along his wife's family to welcome her home to Aceh after a month of job training in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. Muammar is anxious to see Zuhrasafita – and he wants to update her on his search for a permanent home nearly two years after a colossal wave destroyed the foundations of their middle-class life in Banda Aceh.

Across town, in his makeshift workshop, Alamsyah bends to his task: building a cabinet for the TV. Before the tsunami upended his family's world, he made a living as a rickshaw driver, trading fish and other foodstuffs. These days, he's a handyman, repairing roofs and building bathrooms.

For both families, the past two years have brought heartache, hardship – and choices. The Monitor has followed their progress, as well as that of the huge international relief effort for Aceh, the hardest hit of the areas affected by the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami. Despite the difficulties of starting over, both families have considerable hope for the future – even as they recognize that the path ahead will continue to test them.

Inside their small wooden house supplied by a foreign charity, Alamsyah's wife, Juriah, sighs at the mention of the deadly tsunami that carried away her three eldest children. Their bodies were never recovered. In the aftermath, Alamsyah and Juriah went back to their village with their two surviving sons to stay with relatives. It took willpower to return.

"We want to live here. We have the strength now," says Juriah. "After the tsunami, we moved back to the village. But we always remembered our children.... So we decided to move back to Banda Aceh."

After a sluggish start, the rebuilding of Aceh's pulverized 800-mile coastline has begun in earnest with the construction of new houses, clinics, schools, and roads. But with more than 600,000 people left homeless, their livelihoods destroyed by the giant waves that ripped apart Aceh's already creaky infrastructure, progress is inevitably spotty.

Foreign donors pledged more than $7 billion to Aceh, of which about 38 percent has flowed to the province, according to Indonesia's reconstruction agency for Aceh and the island of Nias. That adds up to a rash of construction in and around Banda Aceh, parts of which resembled a moonscape in 2004. A foreign aid- stimulated boom is trickling into the informal economy that supports many of the poor, helped by job programs for survivors.

Despite this activity, surveys of resettled households show greater dissatisfaction in Banda Aceh at the pace of rebuilding than in affected rural communities, says Bruno Dercon, a housing policy adviser to the UN Human Settlements Program. This reflects both higher expectations among urbanites and the task of reconstituting a city almost from scratch in some areas. "They're seeing the houses, but not yet the city. So many neighborhoods were destroyed, and it takes time to rebuild," he says.

At the outset, the two families profiled by the Monitor took opposite paths to recovery. While Muammar waited for a temporary house from an international aid organization, Alamsyah built his own shelter from scavenged materials. Muammar, an artist and TV set designer, turned to his old employer for work; Alamsyah gave up on 20-cent rickshaw rides and opened a coffee kiosk while doing odd jobs.

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