Travelling to Banda Aceh from Jakarta, Indonesia
It is curious how one’s mind slowly fits together pieces of information on a location, built from other people’s descriptions, perceptions, and snippets of facts and figures read here and there. A puzzle of images built up second hand. Of course these images are even more intense when you think of a disaster stricken region like Aceh. The figures already say so much – well over half of the global death toll of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami occurred in this one province of Indonesia. The exact figure is hard to place – some say 120,000, some say 160,000. With that many thousands of people killed in minutes, the chaos that followed made identifying bodies and recording them impossible and impractical. How many people lie in the mass graves around the capital city Banda Aceh is unknown. Aceh’s situation five years after the disaster is one of strength, resilience and recovery at a personal and at a community level. As the history books recount, the people of Aceh are embedded with an intense fighting spirit, whether they were preserving their independence against the Dutch last century, against a centralised Indonesian republic this century, or overcoming one of the largest disasters in living memory. From accounts that I have picked up on the way, the Acehnese people have recovered from this disaster with the help of organisations like the British Red Cross, although their own strength and capacity to cope shines though as the key to their quick recovery. Not everyone has managed to overcome the trauma – these people are referred to by their family and friends as the ones with ‘broken antennas’ – but I have been told that people speak freely about what happened to them, even people who lost their entire families. They provoke a deep respect already. Aceh: First impressions The airport is spanking new, and the roads are slick asphalt. You can tell NGOs have been in town, boosting the local economy that was reduced to ruins in 2004. It is hot and tropical, and rain falls evenly throughout the afternoon. Driving to the hotel, we pass one of the many mass graves where they think around 30,000 people are buried. A huge memorial stands behind the square of land, once an empty pit. It is huge, white, and in the form of a giant wave. After dropping our bags off at our guesthouse, we decide to take a drive around to get a sense of the place before we head out into the smaller coastal communities where the British Red Cross was working between 2005 and 2008. I am at a loss for words when we reach our first destination: a 2,600 tonne ship that was carried five kilometres inland by the wave. It is HUGE. How on earth the wave was powerful enough to bring this hulking monster of metal this far inland seems quite unreal. But there it is. It has been turned into a sort of memorial, and we climbed to the top, where you can just about make out the coastline on the mosque-dotted horizon. Incredible. Some boys show us around the ship and talk to us about how they remember the tsunami. Ari, 19, lost most of his family, swept away by the force of the water that he says made him feel like ‘a piece of fruit in a blender.’ He lost his teeth, but miraculously survived. As the late afternoon call to prayer began across the city, the haunting sound of the mosques filling the air, the sun came out and a beautiful, full arch rainbow appeared across the sky cascading over the ship. When the surrounding areas have been reconstructed, plants and trees have grown back and people are carrying on with their lives, this monument is a powerful reminder to what happened in Aceh almost five years ago. It’s not exactly as I had imagined it, but I am now busy piecing together my own pieces of the puzzle of the tsunami recovery in Aceh.
