17 August 2005

Our flight from Jakarta to Medan on Friday evening was delayed by around an hour and it finally took off shortly after 7pm. We arrived in Medan around 9pm. Riza the driver and his mate Gunawan were already waiting there forus and took us straight to the PMI office to met Herri. Our truck was already waiting there for us. They had arrived a few hours earlier. It had taken them exactly three days this time to drive from Jakarta. In the truck were two drivers and our own driver Purnomo.

We decided that we would leave for Meulaboh around 10.30pm. That left us an hour to do a bit of last minute shopping. Dian had already flown to Medan the day before and we'd asked her to go looking for some radios to give to radio Dalka. She'd found a shop selling Panasonic (not sure if they're genuine!) radios for 35,000Rp so we asked her to put a deposit on 25 on them to make sure that the shop would stay open until we arrived in Medan. So we went to the shop, collected the radios and settled the bill.

We stopped at a roadside noodles stall for a quick bite to eat and then got back to the PMI office to gather everyone together to set of for Meulaboh.

Herri's boss, Pak Edi, the head of the PMI branch in Medan, had called us during the week to ask if we had space in the truck for some medicine and baby milk that they wanted to send. Luckily we had some free space so they loaded on as much as they could. Four PMI staff decided to come for the ride to Meulaboh to unload their boxes in Meulaboh. There was no space in the back of the truck for them so they were riding on top. I wasn't sure why four of them wanted to come given the discomfort of riding on top of a truck for 15 hour or so, but they were very keen. They all been in Meulaboh for a while back in January so they probably wanted to go back and see the progress and also their friends from the PMI branch in Meulaboh.

I'd been looking forward to a shower before setting off, but unfortunately the PMI office had a plumbing problem and the drivers had used us what little water there was.

We set off just before 11pm. We were in the same car as our first trip to Banda Aceh. There were six of us in the car: Riza the driver and his co-pilot Gunawan were in front, Novi and I were in the middle, and Herri and Dian in the back. Cozy. We managed to get a little bit of sleep.

We crossed the border into South Aceh around 5am. The sun rose after 6.30am so we stopped for a bit to stretch our legs and brush our teeth.

Well I brushed mine at least. It was a shower I was really after as it had been 24 hours since my last one, but the water in the public toilets didn't look too clean, so I decided to give it a miss.

The four PMI guys on top of the truck seemed ok. Surprisingly none of them has fallen off the truck and only one had thrown up.

We stopped again in Tapaktuan, the main town in South Aceh, around 11am, to get some breakfast. As well as having breakfast this also gave me a chance to buy a few books I'd been meaning to get. I was contacted a few weeks ago by Jack Large, an American English teacher based in Seoul involved in a organisation called KOTESOL. He has already been working on a number of initiatives to support teachers in Aceh. One of these initiatives is with a teacher in Meulaboh called Zulyadi. He is paying Zulyadi to take on assignments as a reporter recording the experiences of the local survivors in Meulaboh as they attempt to put their lives back together. Jack indicated that Zulyadi was in need of an English dictionary so I went looking for a bookshop. I very quickly found a shop selling some books so I bought three books, an English-Indonesian dictionary, an Indonesian-English dictionary and a book called Mastering English Grammar.

Tapaktuan is in one of the rebel heartlands of Aceh. We got talking to the owner of the cafe where we had breakfast. He told us that despite the new agreement between the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government, people were still being killed on a regular basis around Tapaktuan. He showed us a local newspaper report about a school headmaster who had been shot and killed earlier than week. Noone knew who had killed him. Some said it was GAM and other said it was the TNI, the Indonesian military.

We set off about for the last stretch to Meulaboh. Parts of the road had been damaged by the earthquake of 29 March which had devastated the island of Nias.

We came to a bridge which had collapsed. A makeshift structure had been erected to allow passage. It didn't look like it would last too long.

We reached the outskirts of Meulaboh just before 4pm. We could see that on parts of the coast that had been rendered bare mud by the tsunami the grass had grown back. Even a few rice paddies had been replanted and a few cows were grazing.

We passed a new school which had just recently been built. In general we did not see too much reconstruction going on. It seemed that the only houses being rebuilt were in those cases that individuals had enought money to rebuild their own houses.

It was shortly after 4pm by the time we got to Meulaboh. We decided to go straight for the camp where the toilets are located as we had less than three hours before sunset.

The camp was a lot bigger than the last time we'd seen it. When we were last in Meulaboh there were fifty tents and the occupants had not yet moved into. The numbers of tents had increased to 115. We met Pak Rudyalsjah from radio Dalka who lives across the road from the camp. He told us that there were over 500 people in the camp. As our four toilets were not enough for everyone given the increased size of the camp, the Taiwanese Buddhist foundation who'd originally set up the camp had built a few additional temporary toilets.

He told us that the main complaint from people was the lack of a proper water supply, so we were happy to tell him that we were there to fix this problem.

We handed over the radios to Pak Rudyalsjah. He told us he was getting support from a radio station in Jakarta who were going to provide him with a new FM amplifier and transmitter. Also he was working in partnership with the BBC to relay the World Service news a few days per day, he was also getting support from them to rebuild Dalka FM.

The PMI people unloaded the truck while we had a walk around the camp and had a look at our public toilets.

They were a bit on the dirty side due to the lack of water but had been freshly painted blue. Novi had called Pak Rudyalsjah a few days earlier and arranged this. The people seemed happy to learn we were going to fix the water problem.

It was amazing how normal life seemed to be in the camp. The camp was very clean. Some people had opened shops inside the tents and a few had been reserved for praying.

We went back to Dalka and found Pak Lilik from the PMI there waiting for us. As I said in a previous report he wanted to get into the Guinness Book of Records for collecting the most bodies in one month. He estimated that he'd collected around 1000 in his ambulance in the first month after the tsunami. Even now he's still collecting a few bodies each day. During July he collected 47.

Pak Lilik used to work for the water company in Meulaboh. He has a lot of experience drilling wells to create water supplies and still does this work on a freelance basis. He offered to install our water supply for the toilets. His price was very expensive though at 15 million Rupiah. In Jakarta you only have to drill to about 30 metres and you have a reasonable water supply. This costs about 2 million Rupiah. In Meulaboh you need to go down over 80 metres. I tried to get Pak Lilik to explain why three times the depth mean seven times the price to make sure that we weren't paying too much. He failed to explain why this was so. He was a bit stubborn with us and said that this was the price as the tools and materials were scarce. He refused to budge even with some heated bargaining by Novi. Eventually we gave in. I think the market price of such services is high simply because demand is high. He offered us some extras to install a complete plumbing solution including hooking up to the water tank, and taps in the toilets. This took the price up to 17 million Rupiah.

Next we met with Pak Manto the builder who worked with us previously to build the toilets. We didn't bring our own builder with us this time so we had to rely on him to do the extension to the toilets. I had my laptop with me and quickly did a few drawings to show him how the extension should look:

We hadn't made a decision about a water tower. We had two options: one from Pak Lilik to make a wooden tower and another from Pak Manto to make one from contrete and steel. It was working out cheaper to make one from concrete but Pak Lilik argued that while a concrete tower would be stronger it would also be more rigid and the water tank could fall over if there was another earthquake. The wooden tower would be expensive due to the inflated price of wood in Aceh and we already had enough cement and steel with us to make a concete tower. So we went for the concrete option.

With that complete we spend a hour or so counting out the cash to pay everyone and divided it up between Dian and Purnomo, who were staying behind in Meulaboh to look after things for us, delegating a few responsibilities to each of them. It was already after 9pm and we wanted to get back on the road to Medan again before midnight and we had to catch flights back to Jakarta at 6pm on Sunday.

We went to say goodbye to a few people in the camp before we left. We found a band of drummers there providing the Saturday night entertainment for the residents. The name of this traditional drum is rapai pase and it is traditionally played during festivals as a sign of peace. It was abandoned for many years during the conflict but is enjoying a recent revival with the current peace initiatives.

Pak Dadek the Camat was still in Jakarta and not due back to Meulaboh until Sunday. We gave him a call to ask if we could take a shower at his house before setting off back to Medan. This was the first time we had a wash since Friday morning so this felt good!

We set off back to Medan just before midnight and spent about 14 hours on the road before arriving there. We had a few hours to kill so we went shopping before getting our flight back to Jakarta at 6pm. We only got to spend about seven hours in Meulaboh, much less than what we would have like. There were a few things we didn't get time to do. We didn't get to have a look around the port and markets areas to see how much reconstruction, if any, had been done. Also we didn't get to look for the artists whose paintings had been exhibited recently in Meulaboh. We did however give Dian instructions to find the artists and buy some samples from them.

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