28 February 2005

We arrived in Banda Aceh shortly after 9pm Friday night having  spent 21 hours on the road from Medan. Twenty-one hours to go distance of around 500km or 300 miles. Our PMI (Palang Merah Indonesia or Indonesian Red Cross) friends, Herri and Rico, who accompanied us took us straight to the PMI station there. The PMI station was in a Toyota car showroom. I assume the cars were spoiled by the tsumani are they were nowhere to be seen.

We found that the PMI people there were overloaded with aid stuff but they were unhappy as they were finding they were spending so much effort sorting it and they're severely understaffed.

Also they were finding that so much of the aid sent to them is of little use. Companies are sending their old stock of food items that are past their expiry date or about to expire. I even saw boxes of M&Ms and also those lollipop things that you stick in the fridge to freeze. This sort of stuff has very little nutritional value. Maybe they think the people need a sugar rush to take the tsunami blues away.

Apart from that there were having real distribution problems. There are now mountains of aid in Banda Aceh but the NGOs such as the PMI are unable to get it out to the areas where it is most needed.

We got the PMI people there to jump the queue with our stuff and take it straight to a loading bay for distribution. They were happy to do this as they walked through the contents of our truck and they were really happy that we had brought useful things.

The PMI person responsible for deciding what was being sent out for distribution is called Surya. He's in the photo with me on the left. He himself lost his mother and sister and his house which they were inside at the time the tsunami struck. His eyes light up when he saw we had brought ten gas cookers and ten mattresses.

Surya told us that he wanted to send our stuff by boat to the town of Calang which is on the coast between Banda Aceh and Meulaboh. We've heard reports that the people in Calang are really desperate and have received little aid so far as the road there has been totally cut-off. We saw in the local news that the first four wheel drive made it from Banda Aceh on Sunday, but in the short to medium term the only realistic ways to service Calang will continue to be boat and helicopter. Boat seems to be the best approach as helicopters are extremely expensive to run.

Anyway hopefully our aid is on the way there by now. We were a bit disappointed at first that we were not to see our stuff get into the hands of the people who need it but then with the distribution problems that they're having that simply wasn't possible. Later we decided that we'd done as much as we could as we'd got our truckload of aid to Aceh in one piece and handed it over to a PMI volunteer who himself was a victim of the tsunami.

The PMI told us stories about the chaotic situation in Meulaboh. It seems there is a real lack of co-ordination among the NGOs. There are reports of camps running out of basic things like drinking water while other camps close by are well stocked. The problem is that no one group has the big picture on what stocks are distributed across the different camps run by different NGOs. This is one problem they will have to solve via better coordination.

We only stayed in Banda Aceh for seven hours. We had a look around the city. The city was almost in complete darkness as there are electricity rations and it only comes on during the day. Because of this we had difficulty taking photos with only the car headlights to help us see around.

The few photos that we did manage to take really go nowhere in capturing the massive destruction that we saw there.

We did not see one person in Banda Aceh other than some aid workers, the army and the police who have set up check points all over the city to keep looters away. But there's really noone in Banda Aceh to do any looting anyway.

The people are living in camps outside the city and apparently they only come in during the day as they too afraid at night. It's a real ghost town. We did not see any foreign aid workers. The PMI told us they were camped out around the airport.

We could see that the city had been cleaned up superficially but side roads and some shops were still filled with rubble. And then there are the ships in the middle of the city about 5km from the sea.

We stayed the night in a pharmacy owned by a PMI volunteer called Boby. The pharmacy itself had been flooded by the tsunami although not severely damaged but there was still quite a bad smell on the ground floor. Boby had lost most of his stock and he said he was getting out as soon as he could.

Having heard the warnings about the potential outbreaks of disease we did not eat or drink anything in Banda Aceh other than bottled water and some food we had bought on the road from Medan well outside the tsunami damage zone. Boby offered us some rice and beef curry that the PMI people had cooked but we didn't like the look of it. I stuck to my mie goreng (fried noodles) that I'd bought early on the road. Novi didn't eat anything. So far there have been no major outbreaks but tetanus surprisingly seems to be becoming one of the main killers. The PMI said that they had expected waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery to be the main problems but fortunately there were no major epidemics so far. This may be because the camps are so scattered.

After taking turns to shower with a hosepipe in the garage behind the pharmacy, we got a few hours sleep on the floor upstairs above the pharmacy.

We set off back to Medan at 4am Saturday morning as Herri was worried about the flooding that had caused problems for us the day before. After about 30 minutes the car driver became sick (we were glad we didn't have the beef curry) so we stopped for a few hours to let him rest.

We resumed our journey back to Medan. After about 12 hours we were close to the border with South Sumatra where the flood had been the day before.

We passed the Bon Jovi fans in the VW Beetle who had been queued on the Aceh border with us Friday morning. This was a good sign as it meant that the water had receded. We arrived at the flooded section of the road and found that it was just about passable.

  After 15 hours on the road with a few stop here and there we got back to Medan on Saturday evening. It was good to sleep in a proper bad after roughing for 48 hours.

On Sunday we had a few hours to have a look around Medan before flying back to Jakarta in the evening.

Our flight was delayed as the airport authorities were giving priority to aid flights.

An Australian Air Force plan was one of those flights arriving.

We finally arrived back in Jakarta late Sunday night and then it was back to work again Monday morning. We had been worried about going to Aceh as there are so many rumours in Jakarta about it being dangerous due to robbing of trucks on the road, and the dangers of outbreak of disease. But we're really glad that we went there are we could see what aid we send really got there and we got to meet the PMI people working there. All the rumours turned out to be unfounded and all along the road from Medan people were going out of their way to help us and give us directions and they seemed really appreciative that we were bringing aid. And as for the threat of disease we were careful not to eat of drink anything other that what we had brought with us.

Our plan is now to help the Acehnese people move from the emergency phase to reconstruction. We plan to continue fundraising (we need your help to support and fund us in this of course, but more of that later) and working with the Indonesian Red Cross to do this. Herri from the PMI has given us a revised request with a list of required aid items. These include:

• Mosquito nets (people are really concerned about malaria and dengue fever)

• Plastic sheets for bedding and shelter

• Sandals

• Electrical equipment such as generators, cabling, lamps, torches and switches

• Cleaning equipment such as buckets and mops

• Materials to build communal showers and toilets such as bricks, cement, wc, pipes, washbasins

• School materials such as books, pens, pencils, schoolbags and uniforms

Additionally Herri is requesting some things to help the PMI with their operation. These include:

• Communications equipment such as walkie-talkies and CB radios

• Caps and t-shirts with PMI logo

• Wellington boots

• Hammocks

• Torches

We're currently thinking that out next project can include building  some communal toilets in the camps where the people who have lost everything are living. Sanitation is a real concern at the minute and that must be a first priority.

One good thing  is that we've build up an excellent relationship with Herri from the PMI in Medan and we're talking to him over the phone almost every day. Medan is the last stop where there is some infrastructure before you get to Aceh so they supporting all of the stations in Aceh, and they seem quite well organised, so they are definitely the best people to work with.

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