This network understands that the best way to overcome trauma is by being active, not just sitting around in the barracks without hope.  And speaking of hope, these people's ambitious plans call for nothing less than the comprehensive restoration of their social, economic and cultural lives.  Eventually, all 3,000 families will have permanent, earthquake-proof and fully-serviced houses; their environment will be restored in ecologically-sustainable ways; social and cultural facilities will be in place; their economic vitality will be revived through boat-building, agriculture, home industries and informal economic activities; their communities will be organized and their land-rights secured; they will actively participate in decisions about things that concern their lives, communities and city. 
Here's a bit about what the network is up to ....

1.  Managing the onslaught of external relief aid  
There are a bewildering number and variety of aid organizations at work in Aceh.  Tsunami survivors staying in the camps and out at the villages are of course in dire need of just about everything - food, clothes, medicine, clean water, wells, water tanks, temporary toilets, electricity generators.  But the money, materials, services and good intentions these agencies offer usually come with their own agendas, their own priorities, their own systems for determining who gets the goodies and who doesn't.  What ends up happening is that some villages get a lot of help while others get nothing.  It can get very lopsided.  To deal with this, the Udeep Beusaree network set up a special committee to coordinate external aid.  In early March, they made a public statement (which was well-covered in the press) announcing that this committee of survivors would themselves coordinate all outside aid to the network's 25 member villages, so that everyone could get what they need. 

2.  Building temporary houses and meunasahs

The construction teams in all 25 villages are now busy building temporary houses - ten or twenty at a time - as swiftly as possible, to enable as many people as possible to move out of the camps and barracks and back to their villages.  At first, some villages put up tents on the tiled foundations of their ruined houses, while others began right away knocking together more solid wooden houses, using timber, tin sheets, hardware and tools provided by Uplink.  In most of the villages, the first step is to construct a meunasah (small community mosque). Besides providing a place for prayers, these structures provide space for meetings and shelter for members of the construction team. 

3.  Planting trees and restoring coastal mangrove forests  

There is a lot of tree planting going on in the Udeep Beusaree villages these days.  The network organized a big public event on April 9th, in which the villagers planted tens of thousands of mangroves, cypress, coconut and pine trees along the coast, with various ministers and local officials joining in.  This was partly a symbolic launch of the people's ambitious protective coastal greenbelt revival plans, and partly a memorial to those who'd died in the tsunami, with each tree being planted in a specific someone's memory.  Each village has also been planting coconuts, bananas, papayas and other kinds of trees amidst the ruins, and some are beginning to plant special saline-reducing plants in fields and rice paddies that have been flooded with salt-water.   

4.  Developing permanent housing and community layout plans  

Each village is also working with the architects on Uplink's technical team to draft physical master plans for the redevelopment of their settlement.  This process includes learning how to construct earthquake-proof permanent houses, exploring innovative means of providing low-cost and environmentally-friendly infrastructural services such as paved roads, water supply, electricity and waste-water treatment, and looking at ways of incorporating agriculture and fisheries into village plans.

5.  "Digitizing" the complex land history of 25 erased villages  

Community mapping has been happening in all the villages at two levels simultaneously.  The villagers draw up their own settlement maps as part of their process of surveying and developing their reconstruction plans.  At the same time, Uplink's technical team is helping to make computerized cadastral survey maps of all the villages.  The villagers mark the corners of people's plots with stakes, and then the surveyors use the machine to plot these points electronically.  A group of young villagers have now been trained to use the surveying machine (a loaner from friends at Abhiyan in India).  Once these maps are "digitized", the information in the computer can be used to print-out maps at any scale, to determine how much area each family or the whole village occupies and to make lists of property ownership.  Once the maps are done, villagers can begin matching land plots with the survey lists of surviving families.  All land records and cadastral maps were destroyed in the tsunami, along with the sub district offices where they were kept, so these maps will end up being extremely important documentation for establishing ownership of the land in these destroyed villages.  After all 25 survey maps are finished and survivors clearly identified, the network will take the maps to the local government and ask them to issue new ownership deeds.