When the communities around Dublin Port saw how the St Stephen's Day tsunami had devastated Banda Aceh, they rallied to help. As the first anniversary of the disaster approaches, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic reports from Indonesia, where the first school to be rebuilt has been funded by Irish money
When it came, Mariana and her two young children were in Sabang, an hour’s ferry ride from home in Banda Aceh. This is Indonesia’s westernmost fingertip, so far from Jayapura, at the country’s eastern extremity, that to travel between the two would be to make the journey from Dublin to Moscow and back. Once a bustling shipping centre whose coal and water depots vied with Singapore’s to replenish the steam ships plying the busy Strait of Malacca, the island was forsaken with the arrival of diesel after the second World War. Now it is a place of small fishermen, intrepid snorkellers and old stories of heydays long past. A 10-minute walk along the coast from Sabang is a stretch they call Pantai Paradiso, or Paradise Beach, where the strait joins the Andaman Sea and peters out amid pale sand and coconut palms.
With her parents due to enact a lifetime’s wish and set off on the hajj to Mecca a few days later, Mariana was in town for the traditional departure of the pilgrims. She rose early that Sunday morning, while the house was still quiet, to prepare some Acehnese pastries for the feast. Markhalidin, her husband of 10 years, had stayed at home.
She thinks it was just before 8am when the kitchen floor began to shudder. They’re accustomed to tremors here; generations of Acehnese have known that their tenancy of all this natural beauty is eternally vulnerable to the restless shifts of the seismic belt beneath. Most are tectonic speed bumps, soundless and brief. But this one came with a deep bang, and then another, and then the violent roll of thumps, clatters, screams.
In some places the ground rose and fell eight centimetres, as though a bowling ball were passing underfoot. For 10 minutes it continued, back and forth, back and forth, the ground swelling and falling while, outside, water seemed to rise from nowhere – from the island’s interior? Or was it from the south? – to surge among the houses, lifting all that was loose and dislodging much that wasn’t.
For two days afterwards they wondered about home. The earthquake damage was severe in Sabang, but the wave had broken en route, and most structures had held firm. There were few fatalities in the town. Would Banda Aceh have felt the same force, Mariana wondered. And Markhalidin? Communications were down. For days, they waited.
When she returned to Banda Aceh, Mariana discovered that Sabang had been largely spared. What lay before her was not her town but a colossal, silent wasteland where Banda Aceh once stood. Ports, houses, schools and trees had all vanished, replaced by an expanse of low-lying debris as far as she could see. It was still except for teams of soldiers and young men forming improvised corpse-collection squads, a stench of decomposing bodies still choking the air. So featureless was it that all points of orientation had been erased. When Mariana reached Lampoh
Daya, the village sub-district where her family owned a house, she met some friends, who brought her to where her home would have been.
Part of the foundations could be made out, but the rest was gone: her husband, her extended family, her home and everything she owned.
ALMOSTa year has passed. Mariana is sitting with her children, eight-year-old Amarullah and four-year-old Mardila Aisah, in the shade outside Lampoh Daya’s School 101, the building’s warm cream paint and bright blue roof glistening in the morning sun behind her. With the inauguration ceremony just finished, the school now holds the symbolic honour of being the first in Banda Aceh to be rebuilt since the tsunami. It will also hold the honour of being the only school in Banda Aceh to be inaugurated to the rhetorical lilts of an Irish proverb: Is i scáth a chéile a mhairimid. We live in each other’s shadow or shelter. The words are Joe Burke’s, and the bond he refers to is one between the people of Fairview, Ringsend and East Wall, in Dublin, and those of Lampoh Daya.
School 101’s construction was funded and overseen not by any of the legions of aid agencies based in Indonesia but by Dublin Port Company, of which Burke is chairman, and a number of Dublin community groups.
The ceremony, a celebration of this achievement, is presided over by the mayor of Banda Aceh, Mawardy Nurdin; Burke; and Azwar Hassan of Forum Bangun Aceh, the local non-governmental organisation that handled the logistics. In attendance are the children who will fill the school’s corridors, as well as their parents and some of Lampoh Daya’s minority of survivors. A traditional Acehnese costume, children chase
one another around the yard and, outside, some men display their becaks, or motorcycle taxis, and laugh with their sun-wilted visitors. "From Ayerlan? Ah, Loy Keane! Loy Keane!"
Speeches are delivered and a plaque unveiled. This is only a beginning, the assembly is told, but could there be a more encouraging one? It was a circuitous route that led Dublin Port Company to Banda Aceh. Edel Currie, one of its employees, was on holiday with friends in Phi Phi, a Thai island ravaged by the tsunami, last December.
Shortly after Mariana had watched the waves pass through Sabang, Currie, who comes from East Wall, was awoken several hundred miles away by the same sounds of gushing torrents and fitful screams. Saved by their distance from the beach, Currie and her three friends made for high ground, where they spent 24 helpless hours before fleeing for the mainland. When they got home, Currie asked the company if it could do anything to help the survivors.
Kevin O’Driscoll, its consultant on public affairs and special projects, had spent two years working in Indonesia in the late 1990s. He made calls, renewed old contacts. A man knew a woman who knew of Forum Bangun Aceh, a small organisation of local volunteers that specialises in financing local community projects of special merit. Forum Bangun Aceh wasn’t long in pointing out the priority.
At this time last year, Lampoh Daya’s school had 236 pupils and 11 teachers. Only 40 pupils and one teacher survived. No trace of the original building remained save for some tiles belonging to one of the ground-floor toilets, a fan cover and a few bricks. Other schools in the town fared as badly; of 68 in the area, only three remained.
Contacts developed. Thoughts became plans. Officials approved. Dublin Port Company’s board committed itself to donate about ¤100,000, and, Dublin being Dublin, word of the scheme spread briskly. Soon Charlie Murphy, the company’s community-liaison officer, was fielding calls from schools, societies and local groups from Fairview to Ringsend.
"Listen, we’ve heard what you’re doing. How do we help?" "This was the strange bit," says Murphy, who attended the opening with Currie, Burke, O’Driscoll, and Enda Connellan, the company’s chief executive. "It was word of mouth that got it started. We didn’t intend it to go the way it did. It just happened. Schools were one. A creche was another. There was the community centre in East Wall, development projects, resource centres.
Different groups did different things; there were quiz nights, raffles, a trip on the river for primaryschool kids, race nights, auctions. I think there was this link – one port community helping another – and they latched on to that. Once the disaster hit, people were just overwhelmed by the whole thing."
Contributions were not small: within a few months local groups had raised ¤15,000. A north Dublin accountant agreed to fund a watertreatment plant for the district. A surgeon also said he would cover the cost of a health and dental centre.
TODAY Lampoh Daya does not look like a village. Such was the destruction that only those who knew it with its houses, shops and schools can take the imaginative leap it requires to see it as one. But community there is. The new two-storey school dominates the flat expanse around it, and, as much as its ostensible purpose is vital, it brings other benefits, too. It gives Lampoh Daya a centre again, a place where people can meet and a point by which to orient the new village that will some day arise.
The only teacher to have survived the tsunami was Ibu Fatimah, who is to be its new principal. She suffered the loss of 10 colleagues, as well as those of her younger brother and countless friends. "I left Banda Aceh just after the tsunami, because in our house there were bodies. Around the house, there were so many corpses. Our children, whenever they go home, are still sad because of the memories of the corpses. My own family could run away, but my younger brother is gone." With the rebuilding of the school, she says, her sorrow eases a little more. "Now what we really hope for is the reconstruction of houses, so that the parents of the schoolchildren can have a home again."
Although a year has passed, only 5 per cent of Banda Aceh’s houses have been rebuilt. Most homeless live in tents where their homes once stood or in one of several hundred wooden barracks built to accommodate them temporarily.
There is enough money to finance the town’s needs, but bureaucratic delays have hindered the plethora – the excess, some say – of agencies from acting faster. (One man tells of insistent requests for the title deeds of his former property. "I’d never heard of a title deed before," he says.)
SINCE January, Mariana, Amarullah and Mardila Aisah have been living in a neighbour’s vacant house. Soon the owner will return. Although a Turkish government agency has said it will rebuild her house, she hopes in the meantime to find a tent where they can settle. As a part-time teacher, she receives a small monthly wage, but every note goes directly to the bank. Astonishingly, for the next five years she must continue the repayments on a house that no longer stands. "I have no money. I cannot pay for my own house. I will have to wait until somebody rebuilds it for me. I get only a little pay, and from that I have to pay the bank for my house. My salary is small. How do I feed my kids?"
Mariana was recently given a sewing machine, and she hopes some tailoring will help her meet the weekly expenses. "I don’t have materials for tailoring, but I try to get some. Previously I had my husband, who paid for the daily costs, and my salary paid for the house payments. But now, with my husband gone, and no dispensation from the bank, I have to cover for the two kids with whatever I have."
Improvised normality is returning to parts of Banda Aceh. The rainy season has brought some green to the miles of brown and grey, and, in the part of town farthest from the coast, the market is brimming with local fruit and a cacophony of shouts, calls, quarrels and haggling. The streets teem with cars that go where they please, with only one traffic ordinance in place: the one responsible is the one who hits.
But even the everyday is played out alongside the grotesque. About two miles inland sit a mosque and a cluster of homes that somehow held off the waves, and around them children play in the debris. But in the middle of this group of homes is the starkest of sights: a 180-metre generator ship that must weigh 20,000 tonnes. When the tsunami came, it made its way inland – not in a straight line but in a meandering, clumsy path – and now there is no way to move it. So it stands just where the waves dropped it, as though it were always there, the foundation bricks of some houses poking out from beneath its giant hull.
It is said that, to comprehend such devastation, you must see it with your own eyes. But seeing the effects only makes the cause more incomprehensible still; there is something deeply counterintuitive about such a violent breach of land by the ocean. Perhaps, like timelessness, the mind is not yet made to grasp such reversals. And by a wave 15 metres tall?
There are no contrasts here, no symbols of spared prosperity rising above the panorama of penury. Poverty, dirt and mud create a homogenous, consistent landscape in which all the elements are linked to one another, are correlative. It must have occurred to the first outsiders to arrive here after the tsunami that this town could never be rebuilt, that the land would be better left to its newly-acquired ghosts and its living relocated elsewhere.
Two hundred thousand people are thought to have been killed in Aceh province, and another 160,000 are thought to be missing. Thought, not known. Truth is, they will never know how many people lost their lives. Three hundred thousand?
Four hundred thousand? Are such large figures not meaningless anyway? In some villages not a single person survived.
BEFORE the ceremony to mark the completion of the new school, the mayor sat in his office, discussing its importance with Burke and his colleagues from Dublin. Mawardy Nurdin’s predecessor was killed by the tsunami, and all his municipal buildings were destroyed. The mayor’s new office is large and bright. He is young for a man in his position – 45, maybe – but serious and purposeful. Is there an elected official anywhere in the world with a more onerous brief? Behind him are two large maps of his town. Before and after. One is drawn in deliberate symmetrical lines, the sea occupying a clearly delineated corner to the left of the page. The other is less certain of itself, composed of shapeless blotches, the coast redrawn and huge blue patches mingling with green and turquoise, making it hard to tell where ocean ends and land begins.
He thinks the day when Banda Aceh can begin to feel like a town again is a couple of years away. But School 101 reminds him that progress here will be arrived at by way of 1,000 small steps. He thanks his guests and tells them that, God willing, the school will be a model for things to come. As for his people, they will bear these wounds as generations of Acehnese before them bore theirs. "The people are very strong, and that is because of their faith. Everything comes from God, and everything is taken away by God."