Demystifying earthquake-proof building techniques
Abhiyan has developed many techniques for teaching poor (sometimes illiterate) villagers how to make their traditional house-building methods more earthquake-safe. Kiran's lectures are often given without slides, under a banyan tree or in a dung-floored village square. To help explain technical aspects of earthquake building, Abhiyan has produced some illustrated booklets (left and below), which Kiran brought to Aceh, where they've been translated into Acehnese and have become hot items in the villages.

Piggy-backing on the disaster experiences of some friends in Gujarat, India

While Uplink and UPA have developed considerable advocacy and mobilization skills through their work with the poor in Indonesian cities, organizing a large disaster reconstruction project like this one is a new game for them. To fill in some gaps, Uplink has developed a close working partnership with the Indian NGO Abhiyan, which had dealt with the technical issues of large-scale, participatory reconstruction, after the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat.
The match-making between these two far-flung groups was facilitated by Misereor, the German funding agency which has partnered both Uplink and Abhiyan for years and has been a key supporter of several innovative, community-driven tsunami rehabilitation projects around Asia. In early January, Misereor invited Abhiyan to join ACHR and Uplink on a visit to Aceh, where it was agreed that Abhiyan would act as a support mechanism to Uplink's rehabilitation programs with the communities.
Since then, three professionals from Abhiyan - Mansi, Kiran and Sandeep - have made frequent trips to Aceh to provide a very focused, but very low-key and friendly support to Uplink. As Kiran describes this sharing between two countries and two disasters, "We come to share what we've learned and to give back something after the disaster in Gujarat. We don't want the people in Aceh to make the same mistakes we made!" So far, Abhiyan's assistance to Uplink has been in several areas :

In-situ redevelopment : helping to persuade the Ministry of Environment to support in-situ village rehabilitation in Aceh, incorporating environmental aspects and natural barriers.
Information : organizing the socio-economic survey process in the Udeep Beusaree villages, and setting up a computerized information system to manage and update the data.
Surveying : training villagers, architects to survey ruined villages and develop digitized maps.
Housing : helping organize a participatory housing design and construction process, including training in earthquake-resistant construction.
Village planning : helping people to develop master redevelopment plans for each village.
Building materials : Training villagers to make their own stabilized earth blocks and providing one block-pressing machine.

Designing these houses to survive earthquakes

Banda Aceh is a very high-risk earthquake area now. The epicenter of the earthquake that caused the December 26 tsunami was only 225 kms west of Banda Aceh. While most of the death and destruction was caused by the tsunami, hundreds of people in Banda Aceh were killed inside collapsing buildings during the earthquake that shook the city 15 minutes earlier. Another quake hit in January and still another on June 17, with hundreds more casualties. You can't just build any old ordinary house in Aceh now and go to bed with a clear conscience. Houses that are not designed to resist earthquake pressures are bound to be extremely dangerous to live in.
It may not be possible to build a house that is tsunami-proof, but it is definitely possible to build a house that is earthquake-resistant. Uplink's only requirement for the houses people rebuild is that they be designed in such a way as to withstand an earthquake, and Kiran Vaghela has come from India to help people do just that. Kiran is a civil engineer from Bhuj, a city in Gujarat, India's westernmost state. This city was almost totally leveled by an earthquake on 26 January, 2001. 100,000 houses were destroyed, 400 villages badly damaged and 20,000 people were killed, most when the stone and mud houses they were sleeping in collapsed on top of them.
After this calamity, the government, the NGOs and the people all wanted to know how to make houses that could withstand such an earthquake. As part of Abhiyan's technical team, Kiran helped gather ideas from architects, engineers, and earthquake survivors around the world, and for the past few years has been translating those ideas into the rehabilitation of Bhuj. In June, on his fourth trip to Aceh, Kiran gave a slide-lecture on earthquake-proof building to a packed room of villagers at the Uplink headquarters, mostly members of the Udeep Beusaree construction teams.

As Kiran puts it, "There are two ways of looking at an earthquake: You can say that the earthquake killed my family and there is nothing we can do about it. Or you can say the earthquake didn't kill anybody, the houses that people built killed my family."

After explaining about how earthquakes work, Kiran began to show how masonry buildings can be made much safer by incorporating certain features, like reinforced concrete bands at plinth, sill, lintel and roof levels to tie the house together. "These are small points, but they are very important for the long life of the building and for making sure the family inside is safe." Kiran never stopped emphasizing that "If you build a house without following these principles, to save time or money, you are killing that family. It's murder!" All this may sound very technical, but among these survivors of both tsunami and earthquake, there was intense interest and furious note-taking and poor Kiran was mobbed afterwards with questions.