INDONESIA: Schoolchildren in Indonesia are finding ways of expressing their loss, reports Orla Clinton in Banda Aceh.
Acehnese children returned to school this week but it was no ordinary, happy post-holiday return with giggling children relating holiday escapades. Instead classrooms were bereft of once-familiar teachers, with vacant desks providing a poignant reminder of lost classmates. Some children sat stone-faced in new and unfamiliar surroundings. With old schools flattened or swept away by the tsunami, many children are being reintegrated into existing schools.
Before the tsunami these students, like children everywhere, would run from home to school wearing their uniforms and carrying satchels and lunch-boxes. Now internally displaced, many orphaned, they emerge from makeshift tents, with no siblings or best friends to support them.
They've lost their uniforms, their books and their toys, but still they come smiling and laughing, trying their best to retain something resembling normality when all else has been lost. With little more than the second-hand clothes on their backs, school provides structure, which is perhaps the best boost for youngsters like these.
Seven-year-old Rusle shows the drawing he's just finished. In the background is the tsunami thundering down while capsized boats surround a dead figure. Rusle has lost his home but his family is safe. What he saw that day he won't say, but just points to the stark dead figure which predominates his drawing. Near him sits Muska, also seven, whose quick-thinking father placed him in a fish icebox when the tsunami came. He is busy drawing mountains and big birds.
Both boys are from Lhokseumawe, east of Banda Aceh, an area rich in oil and gas and home to Exxon Mobil Oil. Earlier I had met a woman with a second-hand Exxon Mobil-emblazoned T-shirt stating the oil company was a partner in the community. But there was little evidence of that in the camps and shelters. The chief of one of the affected districts, Tanah Pasir Abu Bakar, says that two weeks ago he approached Exxon Mobil about providing uniforms, but still awaits a reply.
Bertus Louw, a trauma counsellor with Global Relief, says: "Children are severely traumatised and drawings like these give them an opportunity to express what has happened to them." He says 70 per cent of what the children draw is very similar, with huge waves and dead bodies.
Global Relief is training local counsellors to help children like the unnamed 11-year-old girl who grabbed her five-year-old brother but eventually, as her strength waned, had to let him go. Or the children who survived by clinging on to dead bodies in the water.
A recent assessment by the World Health Organisation estimates that up to half the affected population may be experiencing significant psychological distress, with 5-10 per cent possibly developing psychiatric disorders.
"The tsunami has had a profound effect on children which will require a long-term commitment to promote a protective, nurturing environment," says UNICEF emergency officer Shannon Strother. "What these children need now is structure and their friends to help in the healing process. Education needs to be the highest priority," she argues.
UNICEF's Back to School campaign is encouraging and enabling all children to return to classes, even if these take place in temporary camps or damaged buildings. They provide school kits and support for the cleaning and rehabilitation of premises.
But with more than 750 school buildings throughout Aceh destroyed or washed away by the tsunami, and at least 1,700 teachers lost - and with the disappearance of 30 per cent or more of school-going children in some areas - the task facing government and international and local organisations is huge.
Indonesia's Minister for Education, Bambang Soedibyo, told reporters that his government would restore the entire education system by 2009. He said they would be allocating US$41.7 million for rehabilitation this year.
For children like Rusle and Muska, it cannot be soon enough.