Indonesians’ Hopes for Rebuilding Recede

Unexpected challenges stymie charities’ efforts to construct homes lost in last year’s tsunamis

Nearly a year after the tsunamis flattened Indonesia’s Sumatra coast, the only reminder that one Muslim neighborhood ever

existed are the hundreds of little wooden crosses that dot the bare landscape. Hand-painted signs nailed to the stakes read: “The owner of this house is still alive” and “This land belongs to HJ Nur Azizah.”

Most of the houses that once stood here were leveled in every direction for miles. Though all the bodies have been found and removed, and the land has been cleared of splintered wood, twisted cars, and uprooted trees, what remains is a muddy graveyard. In some places all that is left are concrete foundations that rise out of the ground like headstones.

Many of the people whose homes were destroyed in the tsunamis now live in tents or makeshift wooden barracks. Some of the luckier ones have found relatives to take them in. All of them are desperate to return to their land and restart their lives. But only a fraction of the houses that were here have been rebuilt, so most survivors live like refugees in their own country.

“Many organizations and agencies thought once they were able to provide emergency shelter and tents in January and February, it would be possible to provide permanent housing,” says Jan Egeland, the U.N. under secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, during a tour of Aceh, the province in northernmost Sumatra. “That was a miscalculation.”

Despite governments and individuals pledging billions of dollars to help rebuild Aceh, and the presence of hundreds of international NGO’s, fewer than 10,000 permanent houses have been built out of the estimated 125,000 homes needed. Difficulties securing land titles, shortages of wood and concrete, and vexing building codes have all delayed reconstruction efforts. Even groups experienced in building houses have been slow off the mark. Habitat for Humanity is just now putting the finishing touches on 800 of the 10,000 houses it has set as its target.

With living conditions in the camps deteriorating and the monsoon rains making life miserable for the estimated 65,000 people still in tents, frustration levels are rising. Residents of one refugee camp tore down a billboard erected by a nonprofit group that boasted about the number of houses it is building. In several towns, residents have complained that humanitarian groups are using shoddy building materials, and have asked them to leave.

Charity Accused of Lying

Inside the wooden barracks where people from the village of Dayah Mamplam have sought refuge, patience is wearing thin. Mohamed Bukhari,who has no job and who has been living in the crowded camp for months, vacillates between despair and anger.

“World Vision said they would build us houses, but they lie,” says Mr. Bukhari. He and his sister were the only members of their family to survive. “In May they came and promised us 260 permanent houses. They showed us photos. So we cleared the land, and waited and waited. Now the vegetation has grown back. And until now they have not built a single house.”

The villagers in this camp, who live on canned fish and rice distributed by international charities working here, say they understand that delays are inevitable. But they believed World Vision’s promises and even turned down a subsequent offer from Oxfam to build them houses. Mariani, who like many Indonesians has only one name, says the villagers haven’t heard a word from anyone in months.

“When the head of the village went to World Vision’s office in Aceh they were told that the person who handled this had left the country,” says Mariani, who tries to quiet her 10-month-old baby. “We can only live in the barracks for two years. I’m scared where we will go after this.”

The magnitude of the disaster brought unexpected challenges, concedes Geno Teofilo, World Vision’s communications manager in Aceh. Building materials are often in short supply. Land titles were washed away. Village leaders were killed, leaving behind no one who can make decisions for their communities. As a result, internal power struggles plague many neighborhoods, he says, and different factions play the nonprofit groups off one another.

Although World Vision has been lauded for its feeding programs and its community planning, Mr. Teofilo acknowledges that actual housing construction has been slower than he would like.

Even though World Vision is one of the best-financed humanitarian organizations in the tsunami region — it has raised more than $246-million — it has continually revised downward the number of houses it intends to build. Instead of 15,000 houses, its original estimate, the group now plans to build 4,000. To date, only two have been completed.

“Permanent housing takes a long time to build correctly,” says Mr. Teofilo. Communities must be consulted, and it is vital that there is proper planning. He says one aid group rushed to build, only to find its houses swamped by a high tide. “It’s rather unreasonable that everyone will have a house one year after the tsunami.”

‘Logistical Nightmare’

World Vision is by no means the only group facing unexpected difficulties. The most experienced and well-financed organizations were stymied by the scale of the disaster that hit a region where few had experience working. Because of a long-running separatist movement and a state of martial law, Aceh had been closed to most outsiders.

“It’s a logistical nightmare,” says Kris Wangsadiputra, Habitat for Humanity’s program manager. “It’s hard to get wood. The price of bricks has gone up as all the NGO’s start to build. It’s hard to find workers because so many died.”

Nearly every organization building homes is experiencing delays after fuel prices more than doubled in October. Suppliers and transport companies are asking to renegotiate their contracts because they cannot absorb the sharp increase.

Sara Lumsdon, Oxfam’s program coordinator in Aceh, says concrete is now in short supply. “Because of the recent rains the river is too high,” she says, “and they can’t get the sand.”

Charities are also having trouble getting wood that is from environmentally acceptable sources.

Soon after the tsunamis, environmental groups warned that a housing boom could fuel even more illegal logging in Indonesia. They feared that Aceh’s remaining rainforests would be cut down, resulting in yet another environmental disaster. Deforestation is already being blamed for landslides and flooding that have killed hundreds this year.

Attilio Lenzi, a structural engineer and head of construction at Save the Children, is acutely aware of the need to ensure that the wood is from environmentally friendly sources. His organization is one of the few building traditional Indonesian houses, which are wood, as opposed to houses primarily made of brick and cement.

“I put a strict condition that contractors must provide us with the wood’s origin,” Mr. Lenzi says. “If they violate this, we’ll rip up the contract. I don’t know what else we can do.”

Mark Infield, director of Fauna & Flora International in Aceh, says that nonprofit groups are in a real bind. Few, if any, have the capacity to tell if wood is actually from legal sources. Timber merchants are getting better at concealing the true source of the wood, he says. Even his organization, which has been working in Aceh for more than 10 years, is sometimes hard-pressed to prove the wood has not been illegally logged.

To guarantee the source of the wood, some nonprofit groups are now importing their timber, shipping it in from as far away as Australia, but that inevitably means more time and money.

The greatest challenge, however, is land. The tsunamis rewrote the coastal map. Large tracts of land, including farming plots, are now underwater. In some cases new land must be purchased and entire communities have to be relocated.

Buying Property

The government is working with communities to help them buy property, though not all villagers want to move. Fishermen fear they will lose their livelihoods if they go too far inland. Others worry they will have to settle for plots smaller than they had before. Those who rented their homes are anxious that they won’t receive anything. As of yet there has been no policy adopted to reassure them otherwise.

The survivors from the village of Meunasah Bak U, however, can hardly wait to leave their makeshift camp alongside the single-lane road running down the coast. For nearly a year they have lived in tents and in huts they built with scraps of wood scavenged from the beach. They live along the sea, which appears as calm as it did in the minutes before the tsunamis literally wiped their village off the map. Because all they have now is each other, they don’t care where they go, as long as they go together.

“We have all agreed to leave,” says Zakaria Yusef, the village secretary, who like the others living here survived only because he wasn’t home the morning the waves hit. “We want to be away as far as possible from the sea.”

In areas where the waters have receded, and the land has been cleared, issues of land ownership are complicating reconstruction efforts.

Aceh’s public-works department was swamped by the waves, and many documents were lost. Nearly a third of its employees were killed.

According to a joint report prepared by Oxfam and the United Nations Development Program, 300,000 parcels of land were affected; only 25 percent of them had proper titles. Other estimates put this number as low as 5 percent. Mapping the land, conferring with survivors, and issuing titles have added weeks, if not months, to the process.

Nevertheless, Catholic Relief Services is one of many international charities that say they won’t build on land where ownership is unclear.

“We don’t want to create problems in the future,” says Scott P. Campbell, director of the charity’s Aceh division. “We are not just building houses, we are rebuilding communities.”

“But we also don’t promise what we can’t deliver,” Mr. Campbell adds. “We want a longer-term relationship for a longer-term impact.”

Speeding Up Construction

The Indonesian government has tried to speed up construction efforts that had initially been bogged down by what critics called impractical and confusing building codes.

In April the government’s Recovery and Reconstruction Agency was created to coordinate disaster work and streamline the delivery of aid. The agency was granted unprecedented cabinet-level powers and headed by a former minister who is being given high marks by aid groups working on housing.

Where there is no dispute over land ownership, the reconstruction agency says it is willing to issue temporary permission to build so construction can get started.

“If you start to build, I’ll come in and make it happen,” says the agency’s housing deputy, Eddy Purwanto. “To claim that you have to wait for the proper papers is only an excuse for delays.”

Mr. Purwanto says he is disappointed by the pace of reconstruction being done by the larger and more well-known humanitarian organizations working in Aceh.

He believes that it is the small groups that have come, seen what was needed, and just started building. Still, it is the small organizations that have often skirted the reconstruction agency’s regulations and oversight processes.

Mr. Purwanto is particularly critical of international groups that raise money in the United States based on the number of houses they tell donors they will build. But when they submit their plans to his agency, he has seen the final number fall by more than half.

Compounding the problem is that once a nonprofit group has signed a memorandum of understanding with a village, no other group will go in and build.

Groups like Catholic Relief Services have the capacity and the money to erect 18,000 houses but can’t find communities to build in.

“We can’t wait for these people and their promises,” says Mr. Purwanto. “We are going to be evaluating all the NGO’s and donors and making some decisions. We will soon be announcing who is performing and who is not, and recommend that some of them leave Aceh.”

John Long, a housing adviser at the Office of the United Nations Recovery Coordinator for Aceh and Nias, says that can’t happen soon enough.

“A lot of people are building who have no track record constructing houses,” says Mr. Long. He estimates that half the houses being built do not meet the minimum size and safety standards. Some groups build only houses but no bathrooms. Or they build enough houses for only half the community so the people living there have to choose who gets a house.

“People made promises they can’t keep,” says Mr. Long. “We are going to lose the faith of the community. The international community is responsible for that.”

“If we can’t do this right,” he asks, “how can we do anything else right?”