25 January 2005

Having sent off the truck last Monday (17 January), Novi and I had previously decided to cheat a bit by booking flights for Thursday from Jakarta to Medan so that we could meet the truck there. Friday was a public holiday so this meant only taking one day off work. We covered the costs of the flights ourselves as we probably would have gone away for the weekend anyway, and we had decided that going to Aceh with the truck would have been a bit more rewarding that lying on a beach in Bali!

The truck had set off with three drivers and Novi's brother Dede to keep an eye on things and carry a mobile so we could communicate with them along the way. Not that the network coverage is so great in Sumatra. They joined a convoy of trucks also bringing aid to Aceh. Being a bit cramped for space, one of our drivers jumped in a cabin of one of the other trucks which had a bit of space. They lost the convoy later and also our driver whom we haven't heard since. I'm sure he'll be ok.

So Thursday morning we set of to Medan leaving Ronan with his auntie Cucu. We got there before the truck. On arrival we allowed a taxi driver to recommend lunch, and he dropped us at a Padang restaurant in the city centre. Amazingly it was just across the road from the PMI (Palang Merah Indonesia or Indonesian Red Cross) office.

In the PMI office we met a guy called Herri. Herri was a bit funny with us at first trying to get rid of us and the guy we had already spoken with on the phone was already in Aceh but anyway Herri told us we could wait for his supervisor. However they took us seriously when they saw our truck which turned up just at the right time. We asked Herri to accompany us to Aceh to make sure we'd get to the PMI station in Aceh without hassle. He were reluctant to do this as they did not have a spare car. We offered to rent a car to take us to Aceh and pay per diems for two PMI staff to accompany us (they don't get paid, they're all volunteers relying only on per diems as compensation, and even their per diems are not always paid). So with us covering all costs (about 3 million Rp) they then became quite keen to take us to Banda Aceh.

Herri spent a few hours calling around looking for a car. It seemed that all the rent cars had already been chartered to go to Aceh. Finally he arranged a car that would become available at midnight. So we had about eight hours to wait. We stayed there in the PMI office and chatted with Herri and the other staff during our wait for the car. We were shocked to find out that so far they have only received six million USD (3.2 million pounds) in donations following the tsunami. This is a pathetic amount to fund their tsunami relief operation and makes you wonders about all this talk of billions being pledged. Most of them haven't had any per diems paid in the last month so all they've had in return for their efforts is food and not even a bed for the night as most of them are sleeping in tents in Aceh. They have the worst job as one of their main focuses in the tsunami relief has been clearing up the dead bodies. Herri spent two weeks in Meulaboh doing nothing else. Also looking ahead when the foreign NGOs have moved out, it will be left to the PMI to continue their operations supporting the rebuilding of Aceh. We gave them a 2 million Rupiah donation which they said would pay half the cost of sending a truck from Medan to Aceh. I would have given them four million to cover a whole truck but my Citibank card was at its limit for the day.

The next thing to do was to decide where to go. We told Herri we wanted to go to Meulaboh. He told us that this was not possible as a bridge had been swept away by a flood the day before and it would be a few days before it would be repaired. This sort of thing happens all the time in Indonesia during rainy season, tsunami or not. He told us that we might be able to go to Banca Aceh. The road from Medan to Banda Aceh was also flooded and with the water at a height of 1.5 metres nothing had passed also for three days. He reckoned though the water was now going down again and in the worst case there might be a back road through some palm and rubber plantations. We were a bit disappointed that we were going to Banda Aceh and not Meulaboh as we'd heard the reports about the stockpiles of aid and distribution problems but Herri told us this was not an issue as they would be glad to see us given that the road had been shut for three days.

After equipping ourselves with PMI caps, t-shirts and stickers for the car and truck, we set off at midnight. About an hour later we passed though a flooded section of the road which was just about passable and we thought well that wasn't too bad. At 3am however we arrived at the border between the provinces of North Sumatra and Aceh. There's been a armed rebellion going on in Aceh for years and there's a permanent army checkpoint on the border and the army check the ID cards of just about everyone going through. It's a bit like how it was in Northern Ireland going over the border but the lookout towers are a bit less sophisticated, and of course there weren't any banana trees in Northern Ireland! There was a big queue of maybe 500 trucks on the border for miles and the strange thing was that none of them were moving. It was then that we realised that this was the real flood.

The drivers all seemed to be sleeping so we decided to jump the queue and see how the water was. We didn't get that far however as we ran into the army checkpoint. A soldier took my passport away for five minutes and wrote my name in a book and then gave my passport back. And that was it, I was free to go wherever I wanted in Aceh. This was in contradiction with the press reports and gossip back in Jakarta that the army was restricting the movement of foreigners in Aceh. I think that probably some of the problems that the foreign NGO's have faced are cultural given my observations of some of their workers in Medan. They seemed to by trying to be forceful and pushy getting angry with people to try to get their work done. This approach never works in Indonesia and actually it works against you. Not matter how big the emergency, the simple fact is that you'll get a lot further dealing with the Indonesian authorities by keeping calm, being polite and respectful. As I said this is really a cultural thing and quite different from the western way and is something that people new to Indonesia do not always appreciate.

The soldiers told us that the water has risen again but was then starting to fall. But it was still a metre deep. Herri decided that we would stay put at the checkpoint for a while to see if the water would go down and in the worst case we would try the back road through the plantations if the water had not cleared by sunrise. So we spent an hour or so talking to the soldiers as they explained their troubles with the separatist rebels, GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or Free Aceh Movement in English). I must say that as always I found the soldiers very friendly, courteous and professional contradictory to the bad press they get. They we're happy to have us there. We decided to get a few hours sleep before sunrise. Novi slept in the car and I slept on a camping sheet with the others. We managed to get some sleep despite some students in a VW Beetle having a Bon Jovi singalong.

	By 6.30am, the sun was rising and so was the water. So Herri decided that we were going for the plantation route. We set off and found that the plantation route was little more than a mud track.
We led the way in the car and the truck followed behind. It took us five hours to progress 30km and join the main road again. We had some hairy moments going up and down slippery hills especially with the truck on our trail.We stopped for lunch, some goat satay, and let our backsides recover from the bumpy ride.
The areas with tsunami damage gradually became bigger and also the number of tents. But still we were on the eastern coast which was relatively unscathed compared with the destruction to the west.	After a few hours we started to go past some small areas where there was damage from the tsunami and we started to see some tents here and there.
	The strange thing was that we didn't see as many tents as we expected but then we probably saw a camp with ten tents every 2km and considering we covered about 400km along the eastern coasts, that works out about two thousand tents, and if there's 30 people inside each tent that's makes 60,000 people living in tents. And again that's on the eastern coast.
It was becoming clear that we were not going to arrive in Banda Aceh until around 9pm. And we would have to leave again about 4am as Herri was worried about getting back given that the road was flooded and it would only take a heavy shower to put the plantation route out of action. So we would have trouble getting to any of the IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camps with our aid. We finally arrived in Banda Aceh at 9pm. So again all the gossip back in Jakarta about trucks getting robbed on the roads in Aceh proved to be unfounded. We'd found the whole way along the road that people were eagerly going out of their way to help us and give us directions and they seemed really happy and appreciative that we were bringing in aid.

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