Aceh Five Years After

The last two days I’ve been in Aceh, way at the western tip of Indonesia. It was nearly ground zero for the 2004 tsunami which killed an estimated 230,000 people in this region of just over 4 million. In many seaside communities, 80-100% of the inhabitants were killed, many being washed out to sea, never to be seen again.

Walking around, one would never know. Now more than five years later, there are very few visible signs of such vast devastation. Roads and towns have been reconstructed, the natural landscape has mostly recovered, and lives have been rebuilt. It’s a testament to the strength of the Acehnese people that something like this could be overcome, and they seem as cheerful and welcoming as the Indonesians who I’ve met throughout the archipelago.

It’s also a testament to Islam. I think that this is one of those situations—and I must acknowledge that there must be many—when religion has great utility. The people I’ve spoken to in this very predominantly Moslem region—widely described as the most conservative in Indonesia—believe that the tsunami was the work of Allah, and possibly even a punishment for things that were happening on the ground. One man told me that he was very sad to have lost his family, but that “they were now with Allah”, and that this was part of his destiny. He was not an uneducated man, he had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about his place on earth, and this was his worldview, and one shared by many.

This man, Elias, a small machine repairman, had listed all the people in his family who were lost. He survived only by the luck of being at work a few kilometers away, the shop where I met him. The tsunami worked in seemingly strange ways, decimating entire villages and leaving other nearby spots completely untouched. Imagine going home to find your entire community flattened, your family lost, your life obliterated. I can’t even imagine, or perhaps I just don’t want to. I’ll be returning home shortly after being away, and the thought of losing even one of my friends, someone who adds so much to my life, is incomprehensible. And then multiply that by hundreds. I don’t think that I could go on.

Today I visited a radio station, the last one in my work for the Media Development Loan Fund, and got to spend an hour with the on-air host, Rina Anwar. Between delivering the news and spinning songs by Frank Sinatra and Dolly Parton, Rina talked about her response to the tsunami. She shared that the 9.0 earthquake trapped her in her room, an aftershock helped her get out, and then she just started running when she saw the wall of water. At some point, she found a two storey building and climbed to the second floor. The water filled the first floor but didn’t reach the second. Half of her family, spread out over many parts of Aceh, were killed that day. She told me that some of the survivors didn’t even cry, and she, after a week of grieving in her ancestral village, decided that she must move on. She’s been helping others since then, but trying to not get caught up in the past, and not letting herself get sad. Nothing is going to bring these loved ones back. Nothing.

And so many people have done what Abdi, another man I met yesterday, had. He had been a village chief and lost his entire village, including his wife and kids. He has since married another woman who lost her family, and together they’ve had more kids and started a new family. The story is repeated time after time. People are resilient. They survive tragedy. They start anew. And somehow, some happiness flourishes out of the rubble.