We bounce down Banda Aceh’s bumpy streets, past vanished markets, schools, commercial buildings and homes, or smashed versions of them. “What happened there?” Kuntoro Mangkusubroto suddenly asks, looking back through the tinted window of the USAID-donated Mitsubishi SUV.
What looks like a substantial bungalow sits square and erect, except it’s less than half the height it must have been. Kuntoro, MS ’77, knows the ground gave out, as it did in so many parts of northern Sumatra. But it’s rare when an earthquake shows such regard for keeping everything straight.
Often forgotten is the fact that Sumatra, the largest island in Indonesia’s 3,200-mile-long archipelago, was hit by two inter-related disasters last December 26. The first, coming at one minute to 8 in the morning, was a 9.0 magnitude earthquake that cracked and crumbled buildings, and scattered survivors into the open air. The tsunami came 16 minutes later, catching everyone too terrified to take cover inside or too slow to make it to higher ground.
H.T. Panlima, the proprietor of Banda Aceh’s Western Steak House, popular with the international aid agency crowd for its familiar dishes and free broadband, remembers heading out of downtown that morning to his 60-room beachside hotel—until he was stopped by what looked like a huge wall in the distance. “A blue wall—I’m thinking, maybe it’s a cloud, maybe rain,” he recalls. “But there was something wrong. The sun looked strange. Birds were flying in circles. Chickens were running in circles.” Then, suddenly, the streets were flooding and he could see the wall getting bigger and much closer. “So I decide to go back but the streets are flooded, so I try to get to higher ground.”
He managed to, but his hotel staff—14 men and two women, including his mother—were not as lucky. Dismissing his mother’s orders to leave and head for higher ground, all the men stayed put, only to die as the wave crashed the hotel down on them.
Bodies kept washing up everywhere in towns and villages along the coast. The estimated death toll in Aceh province and Nias Island (in North Sumatra province) 80 miles offshore seemed to rise in increments of 10,000. With so many villages and islands cut off, one could only guess—but unlike August’s Katrina disaster, guesses tended to be wildly low.
Surely the toll couldn’t be this high, the devastation so total. But months later, the Indonesian Red Cross put the number of dead at 131,029, the displaced homeless at 572,126. Banda Aceh, the provincial capital with an official population of 400,000, lost a fifth of its people. Calang, population 80,000, and Meulaboh, 50,000, lost half or more. (There is still no agreement among different agencies on the final figure.)
According to Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi NAD-Nias (BRR)—the agency directed by Kuntoro that oversees the region’s reconstruction—693 health facilities, including hospitals, health centers, immunization posts and clinics, were damaged or destroyed, as were 1,662 schools.
Yet despite the enormous physical devastation and the gaping need it created, it was still possible to overbuild, as some communities had started to do. The fact was, Aceh’s demographics had changed. The wave was cruelly selective in flushing out its prey, claiming many more elderly, women and children than adult men—so there was no need, for example, for a new school to be as large as the one it would replace.
Pointing out why a standard, 36-square-meter, wood-frame replacement house didn’t cover all of its original foundation, Glenn Zimmerman of Christian Aid Ministries explained: “Families are smaller now.” The Amish-Mennonite group, based in Berlin, Ohio, aimed to help build up to 500 houses, according to Zimmerman, who arrived in March.
Officially, there are around 300 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working here, although there may be hundreds more. “I have heard anecdotally that there were 900 entities in Aceh at one point,” Reiko Niimi, chief of the Office of the United Nations Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator in Indonesia, said in September. With so much to do and so many helpers, coordination was bound to be a huge, if not impossible, challenge (see sidebar)—and Jakarta didn’t get its umbrella agency in place until three months after the disaster.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono established BRR in March and named Kuntoro its director, a cabinet-level appointment. Kuntoro, 58, had sat in the cabinet before, as energy minister in 1998-99, and had run several state enterprises. At the time of the BRR appointment, he was teaching decision analysis at his undergraduate alma mater, the Bandung Institute of Technology. But he had been active in tsunami relief operations since December as the founding chairman of Global Rescue Network, which dispatched health, rescue and other specialists to Meulaboh. He also had worked with IndoRescue, which developed a plan to build houses and drill water wells in Lamno, another coastal town.
Now Kuntoro and his wife, Tuti (their five sons are grown), would move to Banda Aceh for a three-year term coordinating efforts to revitalize virtually everything across northern Sumatra’s battered economy—homes, schools, livelihoods.
We turn into a road where a crowd swells outside the mosque in the distance. Kuntoro says he likes to get out two or three days a week to visit with people, and this is our first stop. Once hands are clasped and excited greetings traded on the steps, the sandals and flip-flops come off and everyone pours into the building, which on closer inspection is missing a chunk of dome and sections of wall.
With everyone seated in a big, friendly circle on the floor, open-shirted men and women in scarves pipe up with testimonials and questions. Kuntoro purses his lips and listens intently to different points but also uses any opportunity, it seems, to slide in a humorous aside. There is a rhythm to it—chitchat regularly broken by laughter that loudly ricochets off the walls of the cavernous building. Laughter is important in this sad but wonderfully uplifting corner of the world.
“People have a real hard time getting their minds around the magnitude of the disaster—they kind of understand two, eight, 10, 12 deaths, but 179,000 in one fell swoop? They can’t,” Bill McKinney, the U.S. representative for Aceh and North Sumatra reconstruction, said the day before. I asked him how he avoided being overwhelmed by statistics so he didn’t start treating survivors like one. McKinney, point man for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on the island, proceeded to single out members of his local staff who had lost loved ones in the disaster. “Everyone within range of that tsunami has a story of lost loved ones,” he said, frowning.
(One of the saddest and happiest came from my driver, Asnawi, who guided me intermittently around Banda Aceh over a couple of days. On one occasion he arrived with a teenage companion. “Reza is my young brother,” he announced with a proud grin. “His older brother was my best friend—Reza lost all his family, same as me, so now we are brothers.”)
Keeping a human perspective turns out to be easy, working on the ground. Kuntoro keeps his by doing his regular troubleshooting rounds. With the mosque receding behind us, we rumble off in the well-sprung Mitsubishi as he replays the meeting. “Basically, they can’t live in their houses because they’re dangerous, so they were asking about plans,” he begins. “But the most problematic thing is that their graveyard was used as a mass graveyard and it’s all full now—so they don’t know where to go to bury their dead.”
What do you say to something like that?
“I make a note of it and tell them I will see what I can do,” Kuntoro answers. “It’s difficult to find a place that isn’t occupied. I didn’t promise them anything—I listened to their grievances,” he says, pausing. “These people are nice people. They prayed for me, that I will be healthy and can work together with them.”
By Aceh standards, this inland neighborhood got off lightly. But now we are heading to coastal Meuraxa, one of the worst hit of Banda Aceh’s nine districts, as Kuntoro sketches the magnitude of the job ahead.
“In the past 100 years, I believe there’s no natural disaster of its size—and so damaging. Half a million people have been displaced; the total length of the shore devastated by the tsunami is more than 800 kilometers, and you have to include the islands, Nias, Simeulue, and others—those islands are really isolated.”
How do you break down such a monumental rebuilding job into manageable pieces?
“When it comes to the planning process, there are areas, like this area, where we have to be very careful. This is a city, a populated area. A lot of the infrastructure is here, the population density is high, so here we have to be very careful, more systematic.
“But the rest is basically bare land—totally destroyed. If you go to Calang, the total population before the tsunami was 80,000. Now it’s only 35,000, so basically you won’t see anything there. There, you don’t need sophisticated planning.”
In late July, BRR has been a functioning agency for only a short time. Banda Aceh remains a city of bizarre landmarks. On one street, a police car still sits folded into the wall of a wasted building; at the end of another, a huge barge that served as a shoreline power station and rode in on the wave is still moored to a neighborhood miles from the sea. On the other hand, a large fishing vessel that ended up in the courtyard of the Hotel Medan downtown has been removed—leaving room for the humanitarian agency SUVs that pile in every night.
“If you go to less populated areas, you see houses starting to be built—but in populated areas you don’t,” Kuntoro says. “It’s six months since the tsunami, but we’ve only been here two and a half months and I’m proud to say that we have $2.8 billion ready to be disbursed, and we’ve already built 1,500 houses.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean anything because we have to build 150,000 houses and repair another 90,000,” he adds. BRR aims to have 30,000 new houses in place by year-end, and fast-track temporary housing to replace tent cities and make the wait for permanent housing as painless as possible.
“But basically the foundation is there,” Kuntoro continues. “We plan to rebuild this area, but not just the infrastructure. We want to build this region, this province, back better, with a more resilient economy. We want to open up this area from isolation. It’s not only isolated from a technological point of view, but it’s isolated from a psychological point of view, from an emotional point of view.”
Like tsunami-smashed Sri Lanka with its seemingly intractable tensions pitting Tamil against Sinhalese, Indonesia has had its own problems, not least an insurgency led by the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that kept Aceh off-limits to most foreigners for 30 years. But two days after December’s double disaster, GAM declared a ceasefire to let relief workers get to work. Ongoing negotiations between Jakarta and GAM led to a peace agreement—too miraculously, some people worry—in July.
Has Kuntoro ever sensed that locals might suspect his agency of having a political agenda?
“There’s no politics within the organization—I’m here to help people,” Kuntoro says, dismissing the question. But it springs a thought: he says he doesn’t actually know which areas are no-go “conflict” areas and which are the open “secure” areas. “We pass through one area and they don’t disturb us.”
And so the BRR director zeroes in on priorities. No. 1: seeing that reconstruction starts full scale in one or two months—Kuntoro’s target was September at the latest. The list goes on—putting 24,000 people to work rehabilitating farm land; enlisting others to build 7,000 fishing boats by year-end; helping still others revive 600 hectares of fish ponds. An estimated 2,500 teachers were lost, and the loss of craftsmen like shipwrights, for example, left the building of replacement boats to young apprentices in some cases. Niimi predicted one new boat she saw “would be pulp in months.” John Clark, the World Bank’s Aceh-based lead social development specialist for East Asia and the Pacific, explained that some builders cut crucial corners, like using inadequately prepared woods, dooming vessels to almost immediate retirement.
Retooling is high on Kuntoro’s priority list, “so people are involved in the process,” he explains. “When we build houses, we want the workers to come from the area. I don’t want to see sophisticated things. When it comes to vocational training, we will train people to become bricklayers, carpenters, welders, those kinds of basic, maybe semiskilled, skills so they have something and can join the reconstruction process.”
The Mitsubishi bobs and jolts to a stop. We have come to Ulee Lheue, a village that used to hug the shore on the edge of devastated Meuraxa district. A handful of new houses dot the vast emptiness. Last Christmas day, 50,000 lived in Meuraxa.
We are greeted in the dimming light by a bubbly cluster, men and women with ear-to-ear smiles. The star attraction is a tall and handsome shy man Kuntoro describes as his hero. Big John, as everyone calls him, got the ball rolling by being the first to buy into Kuntoro’s policy: no building allowed until someone produces a village plan. He got the neighbors together and produced a plan. A simple sketch on a scrap of paper would do. But it had to indicate roads and house locations, and who belonged to which house—a challenge when all evidence was wiped out. Most of all, it had to render proof that neighbors had come together and talked, and that everyone participated in mapping renewal.
Kuntoro pads about alongside Big John with a gaggle trailing. He beams at the neat, straight and sturdy structures. Villagers beam back. Voices rise and fall, alternating between laughter and what sounds like hard business talk. Aid workers straggle over as word spreads that the affable Kuntoro is in the neighborhood. Clusters of people morph into new clusters, but Big John is never far away, smiling shyly at a polite distance.
Daylight is disappearing. Before exchanging goodbyes, Kuntoro looks out to the sea, past the sunken seawall (it dropped 44 inches into the earth) and the smashed mangroves that once were home to prawns which sustained eddies of aquaculture along Sumatra’s shore. In the distance stands Banda Aceh’s smashed harbor with its never-used ferry terminal, demolished before it could open. In late July, the harbor remains inaccessible, crucial road work still to be done. Sections that looped out from the mainland to the finger of land in the distance were washed out by the wave.
Back in the SUV, we head for a special place, our last stop. On the way Kuntoro reflects on the slowness of everything, and how in the early days he complained, shocked that so little had been done to begin renewal. “A lot of things had actually been done. The city was clean. There were no corpses any more. There was no debris obstructing things. There was no widespread disease—and there was no hunger.
“But there was nothing in terms of reconstruction, no one working in the fields, no people working at carpentry, bricklaying and things like that. So I wondered, what’s happening? The answer was there was no one people could come to and ask if they were allowed to start building. There was no agency, no authority, no direction, no vision. So I was glad to be here, and once they knew there was an agency to help them, they were glad.
“My first policy was to allow them to go back to their villages—there was confusion about whether they could go back or whether they were going to be relocated.” I remind Kuntoro of President Clinton’s urging Sri Lanka to follow Indonesia’s example, and let people return to their land—after Colombo imposed a strict no-return policy on safety grounds.
“Can you imagine survivors of the tsunami?” Kuntoro replies. “They lost everything but their suffering—everyone in the family, house, money, documents—and now they’re not allowed to go back to their piece of land? That’s too much, impossible—all they have is that piece of land.”
Bumping along to our last stop of the day, Kuntoro’s spirits suddenly seem to soar and I suspect Big John might have something to do with it. “Now you can see people start to build. So things are moving, not on a massive scale, but at least people know what they’re allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do.
“What has made me feel good was that, in the beginning, everybody felt rebuilding everything was impossible. It was so complicated; people did not know where to begin. But after two and a half months here, I think it is possible. Why? Because you can see in the eyes of the people that they are optimistic; they have the spirit to live, the spirit to solve the problems.
“Look at Big John’s eyes. They’re full of optimism. Look at the people we met—the feeling of the impossible has been overcome.”
We have arrived at our last stop of the day, headlights beaming on a mosque that seems to be the only structure standing. The scene brings to mind an article about the tsunami in The Bridge, the journal of the American Academy of Engineers: “All over the Indian Ocean, observations of tsunami damage were similar,” it began. “In numerous locations in Sri Lanka, churches and Buddhist temples were left standing. Closer to the beach in Aceh, mosques were the only structures standing in the devastated wasteland of coastal areas. In both locales, residents credited divine intervention; but places of worship are constructed ‘to a higher standard’ than surrounding non-engineered buildings.”
Kuntoro steps out and says he is going to pray now. Before leaving, he confides something. “This is my favorite place to pray,” he says. “This mosque is a very important mosque, for me and for all the people here. When the tsunami came and struck this area, it was the only building to survive.
“The water was up to that roof. Was it God? Was it because of the structure? Because of the time? Well, you can make your choice.”
Different aid agency personnel had expressed opinions on this, off the record. The consensus seemed to be a combination of providence and honest construction. In a country where corruption used to run rampant, the one relationship no one dared chisel with was that with God.
Read a January 2010 update on this story.
JOEL MCCORMICK is a senior editor of Red Herring magazine.
