A Year after tsunami, conditions remain critical in many areas by UN News, Reuters, Oxfam International 3:56pm 15th Dec, 2005   15 December 2005    A Year after tsunami, conditions remain critical in many areas, UN agency warns. (UN News)    With the first anniversary of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami fast approaching, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned today that many areas on the west coast of Aceh, Indonesia, the worst affected region, were still in a critical condition.    “Half a million people in Indonesia are still living in temporary shelter. Entire communities were destroyed,” FAO’s post-tsunami operations coordinator Alex Jones said, noting that there was a danger that international attention and donor support would come to an end before the recovery was complete. “Sustainable recovery requires a five to 10 year effort.”    One of the lessons learned from the disaster, which killed over 230,000 people and displaced some 1.5 million more in 12 countries, is the need for establishing a contingency emergency fund, for which Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed between $500 million and $1 billion, in order to accelerate relief.    “The donor response to the tsunami disaster was huge, but there were still delays in getting help to the people who needed it most,” FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said. “What the world needs is a standby global disaster fund that would make immediate intervention possible.”    Mr. Jones stressed that while preparedness for such a disaster is virtually impossible, there has to be a faster response. “For this to happen, funds need to be available within 30 days of the disaster, not six months, as is usually the case,” he said.    “So there is a need for the creation of a well-financed global emergency fund so that aid agencies have sufficient resources to begin work immediately in the wake of disasters like this.”    FAO has been active in all the affected countries, playing a lead role in advising governments on rehabilitation in fisheries and agriculture as well as helping repair and replace lost and damaged boats and equipment and restoring damaged farmland.    “Our biggest challenge is the scale of the reconstruction effort. Millions of people were affected,” Mr. Jones said. “It was an unprecedented level of destruction. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, around 100 miles of coastline were destroyed – not just a couple of areas or towns.”    Summing up the relief effort one year on, he added: “The overall message is a positive one. A large amount of attention, funding and adequate human resources to address the needs of these countries has resulted in exceptional performance to date.”    15 Dec 2005    “One year on, tsunami survivors remember...and rebuild”, by Bill Tarrant. (Reuters)    Banda Aceh, Dec 15 :- One moment Sartinah Fatar is painting her lovely new traditional Acehnese house, chattering happily to her husband. The next she"s in tears recalling the day the sea roared in and snatched away her mother and two children.    Remember. Rebuild. It"s the slogan of the Indonesian reconstruction agency, set up after the Dec. 26 tsunami killed 231,452 people around the Indian Ocean rim, most of them in Aceh.    Sartinah and hundreds of thousands of other tsunami survivors are doing plenty of both as the anniversary of one of nature"s most ferocious episodes approaches on Dec. 26. Sartinah"s family is one of the lucky few that have a new home. More than 1.5 million people are still living in tattered tent camps, military-style barracks or crammed in with relatives in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Even the dead cry out for better shelter.    Near Sartinah"s house in Kampong Java, a fishing community in Banda Aceh, is a crude hand-painted sign. "This is a mass grave," it says. "Don"t throw garbage on our mortal remains and soul. Allah has called us. Let us rest in peace."    Indeed, for two miles into Banda Aceh the tsunami erased everything, leaving a bleak landscape of cement and tile foundations that resemble big burial slabs in a vast graveyard.    A quarter of Kampong Java"s population of 5,000 survived the 9.15 earthquake, the strongest in 40 years, and the series of tsunami waves it spawned.    Sartinah"s family was eating breakfast when the quake rattled the dishes off the table. They ran outside, joining others who were racing in from the beach shouting "the water is coming". She ran with her husband to the elementary school next door, her 8-year-old daughter close on her heels and her 18-year-old son helping his frail grandmother. Sartinah was about to haul herself onto the roof of the school when the waves, taller than the palm trees in the yard and travelling faster than a train, slammed into her. She never saw her daughter, son and mother again.    "I was hanging onto the roof and thinking I never had a chance to ask for my mother"s forgiveness," Sartinah said, the tears flowing down her cheeks. "As a Muslim you have to ask forgiveness. If your mother doesn"t forgive you, you can"t go to heaven."    The disaster of biblical proportions drew a veritable Noah"s Ark of faith-based groups to the tsunami region, including Muslim Aid, which is building 172 traditional Acehnese homes in Kampong Java. Some survivors wondered why God had unleased such terrible fury on their communities    Overall, the international community raised more than $11 billion, "the most generous and most immediately funded international emergency relief effort ever", U.N. emergency coordinator Jan Egeland said.    Muslim Aid took its design for panggung houses to the surviving residents of Kampong Java and allowed them to customise the design to their own needs, The result was a 48-sq-metre (516 sq ft) three-room, quake-resistant home on thick timber stilts, with concrete walls, a corrugated roof and front verandah. "All the homes look different, so it doesn"t look like a Council housing project," said H. Fadlullah Wilmot, Muslim Aid"s country director in Indonesia.    The donor community has pushed for community involvement in the $10 billion reconstruction effort in the main tsunami affected countries, one of the reasons home rebuilding has gone so slowly, Oxfam International said in a report on Wednesday. "Do it quick, but do it with communities" was the motto when working on shelter throughout the tsunami zone," it said.    Bureaucratic problems in acquiring land, unclear government policies and aid agencies" lack of expertise in building shelters also contributed to delays. Only 15 percent of the 308,000 homes that need to be built in tsunami affected countries have been completed or under construction, according to government data.    While the physical debris has largely been cleared from coastal communities, health workers worry about the wreckage in peoples" minds. The tsunami pulverised entire communities and slaughtered its inhabitants. The monster waves left thousands of orphans, "bachelor towns", women bereft of children and the compounded grief from multiple deaths in families in its awful wake.    A year ago, women outnumbered men in Aceh. A long-running separatist rebellion had thinned the ranks of possible grooms. but the tsunami killed up to 75 percent of the women in coastal communities of Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka and now thousands of widowers are looking for brides.    An Oxfam report in March said women were slowed by the children they carried and were less likely to know how to swim. Men, on the other hand, were out on boats, running errands, or working further inland in fields or hills. Some women still cling to an irrational hope their children are alive; others are undergoing reversals of tubal ligations to try and have babies again.    Aid groups such as New York-based International Rescue Committee have set up "child friendly spaces" to help heal the psychic wounds of the young and most vulnerable. About a fifth of Aceh"s children are suffering at least slight trauma requiring intervention, said Sonny Irwan, an IRC programme coordinator for Cot village down the coast from Kampong Java. There, kindergarten children draw pictures, play on swings -- and sing songs with incredible gusto. Through these forms of expression they can draw on their own inner strengths and heal, he said "In the beginning, they just drew pictures of the tsunami," Irwan said. "Now the pictures are of normal families with the sun and the sky."    Date: 14 Dec 2005    A place to stay, a place to live: Challenges in providing shelter in India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka after the tsunami. (Oxfam International)    On 26 December 2004, an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami that hit the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, Burma, the Seychelles, and Somalia.    Within the space of a few hours, the giant waves devastated thousands of kilometres of coastline and the communities that lived there. While the final death toll will never be known, official estimates indicate that at least 181,516 people perished and 49,936 remain missing. It was the world"s most severe natural disaster since the East Pakistan hurricane of 1970. A further 1.8 million people were displaced into temporary camps or took refuge with communities that were unaffected. In recent times, only war, famine, and epidemics have caused more destruction.    After 26 December, Oxfam International mounted the largest humanitarian effort in its 63-year history. In the 11 months since, we have helped some 1.8 million people, using the $278m given to us. Once the emergency relief was done, we turned to recovery and reconstruction.    This covered a range of issues: the provision of clean water and sanitation; the reviving of livelihoods; rehabilitating agricultural land; giving women and men a say in the rebuilding of their lives and communities. The watchwords have been "reconstruction plus", i.e. seeking to help poor communities to escape the poverty that made them so vulnerable to natural disaster in the first place. However, perhaps one of the most important activities has been - and continues to be - the provision of shelter.    This issue has given governments and agencies involved in tsunami relief and rehabilitation their most difficult task, and we have to face up to the fact that the job has still only just begun. The Office of the UN"s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery reported that, as of September 2005, it would be another 12 - 18 months before every displaced person in Aceh had adequate transitional shelter. It called this "an unacceptable situation that needs to be urgently addressed".    By 26 December 2005, Oxfam estimates that around 20 per cent of the people made homeless a year earlier will be in satisfactory permanent accommodation.    There have been some serious obstacles to faster progress - for example, the fact that in Aceh, Indonesia, land that was home to an estimated 120,000 people is now submerged or permanently uninhabitable. Other delays have more to do with problems of bureaucracy and organisation, in governments and in the international humanitarian agencies.    Proposals for buffer zones - land near the sea that would not be built on again - has significantly delayed rebuilding in India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Government institutions in Aceh were badly damaged by the tsunami, as was all the province"s infrastructure, and the lack for some months of a fully functioning civil authority made coherent planning extremely difficult. This paper hopes to examine what has been achieved so far and what has still to happen, and to suggest what should be done better.    Life before the tsunami    Even before the tsunami struck, many millions of people in the affected areas were living in conditions of poverty unimaginable to most people in Europe, Australia, and North America.    In Aceh province in Indonesia, the security of lives, possessions, and infrastructure had been threatened by several years of armed conflict. According to the government"s own statistics, in 2002 (the latest date for which figures are available) nearly half (48.5 per cent) of the population had no access to clean water, one in three (36.2 per cent) children under the age of five were undernourished, and 38 per cent of the population had no access to health facilities. And things were getting worse: the poverty rate doubled from 14.7 per cent in 1999 to 29.8 per cent in 2002.    The southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala are among the wealthier parts of India. Tamil Nadu has the fourth highest per capita income of any state in the country. Yet poverty and deprivation exist in both these states: in Tamil Nadu nearly half (46.6 per cent) of children under five years old were underweight before the tsunami, due to malnutrition. Four out of every five households in Kerala had no access to safe water. The people of the coastal communities were, and still are, among the poorest in the whole country. In India as a whole, the livelihoods of 3.2 million people were directly or indirectly affected by the tsunami.    Similarly, despite the boom in tourism in coastal Sri Lanka in recent years, 29 per cent of children under the age of five were underweight due to malnutrition, and 45.4 per cent of the population received wages of less than $2 per day. Some of the poorest people include those who were displaced by the war that ended in 2002, and who have been living in refugee camps for many years.    The challenges    The chief problem with providing shelter after the tsunami lay first in the scale of the destruction of homes and, to a lesser extent, in the poverty of those who lived in them. In the three worst-hit countries -- India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka -- the majority of people who suffered lived on the margins, on the edge both of the sea and of society.    Houses were often fragile and so the violence of the waves rendered extraordinary numbers of people homeless: in Aceh, for instance, no houses at all were left standing over many acres of land, and large amounts of land were permanently lost.    Along the coasts of southern India and Sri Lanka, virtually all homes were destroyed in a belt stretching up to half a kilometre inland, for hundreds of miles. And so the challenge is enormous. In Aceh alone, around 600,000 people - a population the size of Boston or Glasgow - have been made homeless.    Few humanitarian agencies had ever faced need on this scale, spread over such a wide area. The governments of the three worst-affected countries had capacities that differed widely. Building permanent housing is a slow business, even in stable, rich societies. In Florida, for example, thousands of families remain in temporary accommodation more than a year after Hurricane Ivan hit the state. The earthquake which struck Kobe, Japan in 1995 left 300,000 homeless, and it took seven years for the city to recover to the social and economic levels it had had prior to the earthquake.    It is clear from the response to other earthquakes - in Bam in Iran, for example - that it can take two years before a programme for rebuilding permanent homes starts to reach its optimum production levels.    Despite this knowledge, an important error in the initial work done on shelter was that few of those in need of new homes were told just how long they might expect to wait.    Though the waves wreaked their havoc in different ways in the three different countries, some crucial issues were common to all. Providing permanent shelter, NGOs knew, meant more than just starting to build houses.    We had to: enable communities to express their wishes and design homes that met their needs; build a dialogue with governments over a range of political and legal issues; help solve complex issues of land ownership and good land use; cater to the requirements of different communities, with distinct means of earning livelihoods; ensure access to water and sanitation; ensure the needs and opinions of women and vulnerable groups were heeded; deal with frustration and disappointment, recognising that good rebuilding takes a long time.
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