Three days after the tsunami, we went back to our own homes. Initially, we were scared, but because we are fishermen, we can't stay too long in the refugee camps. We need to continue our livelihoods, because the tsunami aid is not going to continue to sustain us for the coming year. So we took the initiative to return home together."
A fisherman from Lam Tengoh village, in Aceh Besar District.

A national network of urban poor groups and their supporters bring fresh ideas into Banda Aceh's tsunami rehabilitation process

Urban Poor Linkage (Uplink) is a network of poor community groups, professionals and NGOs in 14 Indonesian cities, working to establish strong, independent city-level and national networks of urban poor communities which can develop and promote just and pro-poor alternative social, economic and cultural systems in Indonesian cities. The network is coordinated by the Jakarta-based NGO Urban Poor Consortium (UPC). Since the tsunami, UPC and Uplink have been working in Aceh, in close partnership with the German funding agency Misereor.
In the early weeks, Uplink provided emergency relief to survivors in Banda Aceh and other areas of Aceh Province, the most devastated area in all of Asia, organized urban poor groups from across the country to contribute cash, clothing, food and tools to this effort, and mobilized volunteers to come help in the relief efforts. After shipping in 50 tons of emergency supplies, they worked closely with several NGO networks and aid organizations to coordinate and distribute these supplies. In the camps being set up in Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar, Uplink sent in alternative health teams to treat injured survivors and musicians to boost spirits, and gradually began collecting basic data on survivors.
Since late January, UPC and Uplink have been working more closely with a large group of coastal villages along the devastated western coast of Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar, to support the longer-term rehabilitation of these people's ruined villages and lives. In the following pages, we take a detailed look at this extraordinary work.

Even though three-quarters of the people in these coastal villages died in the tsunami, the survivors are still determined to rebuild their lives and their communities. Using their own hands, they have gradually begun clearing the debris, collecting wooden planks and other materials to later use to build their temporary shelters and meunasahs (community mosques) in their villages. With only minimal support from outsiders, these brave people are attempting to go back to land which is clearly sacred to them - sacred because that is where their roots are, as well as their ancestors, their history and their future.
Through the relief process, Uplink had begun to make contacts with villagers staying in the camps and barracks around Banda Aceh. Gradually, we began identifying communities that were expressing their strong intention to go back by taking the initiative to start cleaning up their village land and collecting recyclable materials for building. In some cases, the villagers themselves came to Uplink, in others, the headmen made the contact. We began gathering these people together to talk about what to do, and made it clear that if they wanted to return to their old villages together, we would support them. When the government began saying stay in the camps, it's not safe to go back, the leaders of fishing communities around Aceh organized a province-wide meeting to talk about what to do. They invited the Minister of Maritime Affairs to come.
For these people, relocation to new village 20 kilometers inland was not possible. They are fishermen and moving to these places would take their livelihoods, their land and their future out of their hands. At the end of the meeting, they made a very strong public statement that the fishermen don't want to relocate, they want to return to their old villages. It's a matter of life and death for them, they said, because fishing is their means of survival. The 15th of February was the date the government had formally set, by which time all the tsunami survivors should be in the relief camps and government barracks. On the 26th of February, villagers from a large number of ocean-side communities in Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar District organized another event to demonstrate their defiance of the government's barracks and relocation policies and their determination to reoccupy their old land. This time, they spoke with their actions. In the camps where they'd been staying, they folded up their tents, gathered their meager belongings and all together, as a big group, went back home. They went in trucks, on scooters, on bicycles and on foot, across the ruined city and back to their original villages. It was a motley but triumphant parade, and was widely covered by the media.

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

More on the The Udeep Beusaree network at work . . . here

                

 

Lukman's guided tour
HERE