A few snapshots from Lukman's guided tour of villages in the Udeep Beusaree Network . .

It was a beautiful city

The location of Banda Aceh is spectacular. Built at the extreme northern tip of Sumatra, the city sprawls across a crescent of flat land which encloses a natural bay, and is surrounded on three sides by lush green mountains, where they grow coffee and cinnamon. In the purple distance, you can see an active volcano, which exhales a flourish of steam all day long. Before the waves destroyed almost three-quarters of it, Banda Aceh was a city of cafes, tree-lined streets and hundreds of mosques - the older ones flanked by white minarets and topped with huge, black, onion-shaped domes.

Everything gone

Five months after the tsunami, signs of life return to these battered villages . . .

Everywhere we look, twisted steel bars, bricks, uprooted trees, stinking pools of water and sludge, and almost no trees to give shade from the relentless sun. They've cleared a lot of the large-scale rubble by now, but when we stop and walk around, we find the ground everywhere littered with the small-scale detritus of human lives - rubber slippers, handkerchiefs, broken teacups, picture frames, school books, hair-clips, bits of wooden furniture, cushions, license plates, belt-buckles, toothbrushes. How eerie it is to think that a whole city used to be here, with houses, cinemas, apartment buildings, banks, hotels, mosques, shops, markets, petrol pumps, telephone poles, public buses, parks. Everything - everything - is gone.

In May, we had a chance to spend a few days visiting the Uplink project in Banda Aceh. Our wonderful guides from Udeep Beusaree were Lukman, the community leader in Cot Lamkuweh, and Iskandar, a young carpenter from Gampong Baru, both working full time now on rebuilding their villages. We'd seen the pictures and newscasts of the destruction in Banda Aceh, but nothing could prepare us for the shock when Lukman first drove us out into the vast areas where the tsunami struck.

At first it was mostly ruined buildings and piles of rubble, but as we got closer to the sea, things became more and more empty.

First Udeep Beusaree houses

Finally, there were no landmarks, no houses, no trees, no anything - just vast expanses of broken ground, muck and rubble, as far as we could see. Here are a few of the photos and notes from that visit.

It is only once we come out to the coast, where the long line of Udeep Beusaree villages begins, that we start seeing signs of life and hope and activity. Out here, the little timber houses, with their twinkling tin-sheet roofs, are the only objects on the horizon, except for a few surviving coconut palms and an old tree or two. Aid agencies like PLAN, CARE and Oxfam have provided water tanks or tube wells or water purification plants in some villages, and an Australian group has built pit latrines. Dedicated returnees with no temporary houses yet camp out in sturdy UNHCR canvas tents, set up on the plinths of ruined houses. But as Lukman says, "No government anything!"

People's stories

We never asked anybody directly about their losses in the tsunami, but everywhere we go, the stories come tumbling out anyway: the harrowing escapes, the miraculous rescues, the rolling up of pant-legs and shirt-sleeves to show the scars of terrible injuries, the rosters of dead children, spouses, parents, siblings, friends. It's been only five months since the tsunami, but already there is a sense that the process of absorbing all this unimaginable loss has begun. You can imagine these same stories being told and retold in the coming years to children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

We set off from the spruced-up old farmhouse and barn in Ulee Kareng, a part of Banda Aceh that escaped the tsunami's fury, where Uplink has established a lively headquarters for both the Udeep Beusaree villagers and for Uplink's professional support team. The place buzzes all day long with meetings, phone calling, visiting friends and officials from all over, data-processing, architectural drawing and model-making. There is always coffee and something to eat, and at night the place becomes a crowdeddormitory. Most of the project staff helping out

with data processing, office work, reception and logistics are survivors from the Udeep Beusaree villages

Pride of place

We stop in the village of Meunasah Tuha, where so many people died that the survivors are thinking of completely reorganizing their village plan, so people can live closer together - and further from the sea. The temporary houses people are building here are knocked together with the roughest of rough green timber planks, but even so, they remain studies in pride of place, even out in this desolate place. Many villagers have painted their houses in vivid shades of red, pink, green and blue, and added lots of nice flourishes with gingerbread cut-outs and some mismatched architectural bits salvaged from the rubble - some nicely turned balustrades here, an elaborate window frame there.

Prayers in the meunasah

Coffee in the Wilderness

In Lam Gurun village, Lukman joins the men for prayers at the make-shift meunasah they've built with salvaged wood at the center of the community. Lukman is a very devout Muslim in a very devout region of Indonesia, and can recite long passages of the Koran in Arabic with great feeling. After the men all wash their hands and feet and go inside to pray, we sit outside with some of the children, who one by one shake hands and tell us their beautiful names: Amelia, Molina, Sofriani and Aida. At the end of the prayers, the men form concentric circles and go around shaking each other's hands, until everyone has greeted everyone else. And after shaking hands, they touch their hearts.

Cash-for-work

There is a lovely tradition in Banda Aceh of socializing in coffee houses that are all over the city (called "alamsha" in Acehnese). The delicious, locally-grown coffee is brewed by being poured dramatically through a big cloth filter, back and forth between two steel pots (above). It's served strong, black and very sweet in little glasses, along with plate-fulls of syrupy rice sweets. Lukman says "Yaaa, man! It really gives strength!" In tsunami-wrecked areas of the city, the very first businesses to pop up amidst the desolation are make-shift alamsha - knocked together with scraps of salvaged wood and tin sheets, in the shade of some surviving tree or along a rutted road. These places instantly become vital points of congregation, where people stop to refresh themselves and get the news, on their trips out to the old land to clean up, to build, to mourn, to see what's happening. And business is definitely booming.

So many people we meet lost their jobs after the tsunami and have little hope of finding new work in the near future. In the mean time, we pass many teams of villagers making a little money by helping clear the heavy rubble from their villages, which is still going on, even five months after the tsunami. Several organizations, like IRD, Mercy Corps, Oxfam and USAID have a scheme which pays Rp.30,000 to 40,000 (US$ 3 - 4) per day to help clean up the rubble from tsunami-ravaged areas.

Spirits with good reasons to be unquiet

There is an indigenous tradition in Aceh - from long before Islam - of performing death anniversary ceremonies on the third, seventh, 40th and 100th day after a person's death. Uplink had plans to organize a communal prayer ceremony for all the tsunami deaths on the 100-day death anniversary, in early April. But things got so busy around then, with ministerial visits and relief work, that the ceremony only happened in small, scattered ways. Shortly afterwards, there were eerie disturbances in the Uplink headquarters, and many felt there were unhappy spirits around who could not find their way along.

Some spirit mediums in Jakarta and Aceh who'd been in touch with each other decided to come and see if they could help these spirits make their way out of this world they'd somehow gotten stuck in. The second night we were there, we drove with them in the day's last light all the way out to Lam Gurun, one of the last villages in the Udeep Beusaree line. The road was too broken up to drive any further, but the spirits directed them to "follow the smoke" which we could see rising from behind a little hillock in the near distance. It was too dark to go on, but the mediums gave directions to the villagers who later discovered a cave behind that little hill, in which many bodies lay undiscovered.

It's no wonder there are bewildered spirits around, where so many people died so violently and so suddenly, many without ever being identified, many with nobody left to mourn them. As bodies were found, they were just wrapped in plastic bags and bulldozed into mass graves, without any funeral rites or prayers. Even six months after the tsunami, skeletons and corpses were still turning up regularly in caves, flooded fields and on beaches.