ACEH    INDONESIA

 

Tsunami Networking in Indonesia

An outside intervention helps support and organize this going back, and sets off a people-driven rehabilitation direction in the process :

We can be happy and be sad together.  Now we do everything together:  we build our houses together, we will move back to the village together.  It was our idea to move back to the village and Uplink supported us.  Uplink said "It depends on you.  If you want to go back, we'll help.  If you need houses, we'll help."   
(Lukman, community leader at Cot Lamkuweh Village)

Three weeks after the disaster, Uplink began to shift the focus of its activities from emergency relief to supporting those villages which were clearly determined to go back and rebuild their lives and communities on their old land along the coast.  Besides being some of the worst-hit areas in all of Asia, these coastal fishing villages close to the city were among the most threatened by government policies to relocate them to areas far away.

Uplink's work with the urban poor in other Indonesian cities had shown that isolated projects in isolated communities seldom create the momentum for significant change.  But when networks of communities with common problems link together and jointly tackle problems of land, housing and livelihood, a number of things happen:

• Wider linkages create larger platforms for learning and sharing ideas between vulnerable and isolated groups.
• This allows groups to borrow from each other's successes in designing their own solutions to problems they face with land, housing, livelihood, health and access to basic services. 
• Linking into wider networks also builds the scale and clout required to negotiate with the state to support these people-driven alternatives they develop themselves. 

Uplink's intervention in tsunami-ravaged Aceh, therefore, sought clearly to help build and strengthen a network among these returning villages, so they could work together and learn from each other and create a unified force for change.  With the active support of its established partner, the German funding agency Misereor, Uplink set about supporting a growing number of villages to link together and jointly tackle all the short and long-term tasks involved in rebuilding their lives in the old villages. 

By May, the project covered 25 ruined villages, occupying one long, continuous stretch of coastal land which is partly in Banda Aceh Municipality (in Meuraxa and Jaya Baru sub districts), and partly in Aceh Besar Regency (in Peukan Bada sub district).  Besides assisting these homeless villagers to go back, Uplink's intervention also sought to use the rebuilding to show an alternative to the government policies which conflict with people's need to return to their own land.

The idea has been to show an active, people-driven alternative to the government's relocation policies, with enough scale to make an impact on the government policy and enough viability to show other tsunami survivors in Aceh how going back is possible. 

Forming a large-scale survivors network in the worst-hit part of Asia's worst-hit country . . .

In March, 14 returning villages joined together to form a network, and decided to call themselves Udeep Beusaree ("Live together" in Acehnese).  By May, the network had expanded to 25 villages, all in some stage of moving back to their old land and constructing temporary houses there.  The network's energy and determination have generated waves of returning villagers in neighboring areas and given life back to the area.  As Wardah describes it, "In the day time, the sun shines on growing numbers of corrugated zinc roofs, and at night, generator-powered electric lights are to be seen twinkling where before all was blackness."   With organizational support from Uplink, each village has set up teams to handle various aspects of relief and reconstruction :

Construction teams build temporary and permanent houses and infrastructure.

Logistics teams distribute food, manage public kitchens, buy and distribute building materials.

Survey teams gather and keep updating detailed information on survivors.

Women and children teams look after the special needs of women and children.

Environment teams organize tree planting, eco-village planning and alternative health services.

Economic teams support income generation projects and manage accounts.

Advocacy teams share information and maintain links with outside groups, facilitate negotiations on inter-community issues such as joint infrastructure and village borders.

There are also inter-village teams made up of representatives from each of the teams in all 25 villages, and these teams work closely with Uplink's technical support team.  These inter-village teams are extremely busy now, with a crowded schedule of meetings, exchanges, big events, ground-breakings, official visits, sharing of ideas, making for a very large and vital field of learning.

The first and the biggest and the most and the worst . . .

 

The Udeep Beusaree Network

If you drew a line around the 25 Upeep Beusaree villages on a map which shows the tsunami's radiating path from the December 26 earthquake's epicenter in the Indian Ocean, you'd see something chilling:  this small, intensely-inhabited crescent of coastline lies closest to that point and was one of the first places the waves struck.  When they did strike, the waves were bigger here, more powerful and more destructive than almost anywhere else.  More people died in these 25 villages alone than in all of Thailand.  It's no exaggeration therefore, to say that in all of Asia, these communities comprise some of the worst-hit villages in the worst-hit city of the worst-hit country.

Bahasa Aceh language lesson number one    

"Woe u gampong" means
"Go back to the village"

• Number of villages in the network:   25 villages (in three adjacent sub districts of Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar)
• Pre-tsunami population in these villages :   14,144 people  (3,507 families)
• Number of surviving families :   2,754 families  (78% of original families)
• Total surviving population after the tsunami :   6,683 people  (47% of original population)
• Number of FEMALE survivors:  2,642   (39% of total survivors)
• Number of MALE survivors:   4,041   (61% of total survivors)

 

The Udeep Beusaree network at work . . .HERE