busy busy busy

Banda Aceh is bustling with activity, between the military, the press, and the foreign aid workers, etc.. We're working 16-hour days out of our house/office, and running all over town all day to visit the various UN offices, International Office of Migration, US Agency for International Development, other aid groups, etc., to acquire the goods we want to put on our ship so we can start scouting the coast for communities of newly-homeless people who haven't received any food or medical care since the tsunami. They don't have toilets or blankets or even shoes in a lot of cases. We're going to coordinating meetings between all agencies, where there are French, Dutch, Indian, Australian, English, German, Canadian, Japanese and Italian relief workers, and no one seems to have all the information... we all get what we can when we can. Cell phones and internet make it much easier. I'm poring over maps to find these obscure villages where people are supposed to be huddling waiting for clean water or blankets. We go all over town to buy things the other organizations can't give us, and we send drivers to towns hours away with bags of money to purchase us goods. There's lots to do and measure and buy and calculate and write and see and think about, but not much time to sit down.

Yesterday I saw the tsunami site, i.e., what was formerly the town of Banda Aceh. Used to be a populated, lively place that stretched on for miles, and now it's like Hiroshima or Nuremburg - just nothing nothing nothing there. The water came in and wiped away homes and cars and people and furniture and trees and everything else for up to 10 miles INLAND!! INLAND!! Can you imagine?? Very hard to get a handle on, even from the pictures you've seen on TV. We stood on what looked like a moonscape and saw pieces of broken buildings, chunks of concrete and wood, puddles of muck with various objects poking out of them, trees bent over broken walls, bicycles and boats twisted almost unrecognizably, boats perched precariously on rooftops, and miles and miles around not a single intact structure. The army is clearing roads so that they can haul off debris, but I can't imagine how many years it will take to get all the junk cleared away, much less create newly habitable spaces for the people who were lucky enough to flee alive. We were at the coast watching the sea and our Indonesian guide told us that the spot we were standing on used to be 3 miles INLAND - now the old "coast" is totally hidden underwater. Totally incredible devastation. Occasionally we saw people walking looking for their homes or their belongings or their relatives. The Indonesian soldiers we talked to told us their job was to recover bodies.

There were reports in the media about the government wanting to kick out all foreigners by March, but that was later clarified to mean the foreign military. They've also been saying that the local militia is keeping aid from getting to the people who need it - that's not entirely true, although there are accounts of bribery, which is normal for Indonesia. Also not true is the report that there are mass outbreaks of malaria or cholera - we haven't heard of any.

I sleep under a mosquito net on a mattress in one of the back bedrooms of the house. A local woman cooks some very delicious meals for us and the driver takes us where we need to go. The other Indonesian helpers are very nice, and eager to help out as much as they can with logistics, purchasing, translation, cultural assistance, etc. It rains every afternoon. Geckos hang out on the wall in front of the house in the evening. A goat tried to come in the kitchen while I was reading in there today. Mark is leaving tomorrow and some more PCI people are coming.