Aceh a testament to aid successes and failures

Across Aceh, though, plenty of aid workers are following through on their promises, struggling to put Aceh back on its feet.

They are a hybrid tribe: Indonesian, American, Dutch, Korean, British, Japanese and an array of other nationalities. They range from people just out of college to veterans with advanced degrees in development economics.

Conversations at the tiny Banda Aceh airport, jammed for nearly every flight with aid workers, revolve around everything from ways to ship 150 prefab houses in from Turkey to tips on prime surfing spots.

Along Aceh’s east coast, one young Spanish engineer has been trying to bring water and sanitation to thousands of displaced people.

David Osorio’s enthusiasm for sewage systems appears limitless.

“For me, that’s beautiful,” Osorio said, pointing to a group of sewage tanks he built outside a set of barracks. “It’s clean. There aren’t so much mosquitoes, not so much flies.”

Spending complexities
A rail-thin man almost always clutching a cigarette, he’s clearly popular among the people in the barracks, and he calls out greetings in his exuberantly bad Indonesian.

His work reflects many of the complexities of aid spending.

The issues are partially about finances, whether it’s $7.50 to deliver a truckload of water or tens of thousands of dollars to install a large sewer system, but more about the larger implications of how the aid will affect people’s lives.

When, for instance, is it right to install running water in a survivors’ camp, which may encourage people to stay there too long? Or when should water be trucked to a devastated village where the wells have turned salty? The trucked water will let people return home, but to a village that remains largely destroyed.

“It’s all about balance,” said Osorio, who works for Oxfam.

Back to the village
He sees his role, in part, in helping restore the pre-tsunami sense of community, even if it means moving back to a village still in ruins.

“Even if they aren’t perfect, they have 1,000 times the dignity” in their own villages, he said. “Before (the tsunami) their life was the village and now it’s back to the village.”

The villagers with whom he works agree.

“The people don’t want to wait for help in the barracks. They want to get back to their daily work. They want to sleep at home,” said Abduraman, a leader in a pair of destroyed twin fishing villages, Geunteng Timur and Geunteng Barat, where Oxfam trucks in water every day.

For now, most villagers are living in homes they’ve fashioned from plastic sheeting and scrap wood, but houses, real houses, with concrete floors, metal roofs and maybe even indoor toilets, have been promised by various organizations. For now, though, the village is waiting.

Asked why, Abduraman shrugs.

“We must be patient.”

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