FRIDAY 5 JANUARY:

Saiful and his driver are now staying in the same house as us, so we breakfast together at 8.00 am. Saiful tells us about houses that Muslim Aid is building in this area. When we were here in April, we inspected traditional houses in wood that they were building in Banda Aceh – now, like most NGO’s they are also building in brick and concrete – as apparently that is what many people want at the moment

Thousands live in barracks

We try to get rough figures from him – it seems that there are still very large numbers of families without permanent housing. Saiful knows of at least 15,000 temporary houses, each being shared by 3-5 families. And he estimates there are at least 18,000 families still living in barracks. If you average each family at 4 people (I’m guessing here, but I reckon it must be at least 4), that comes to a very sizeable number of people (it could be as many as 300,000 people living in shared temporary houses, and about 75,000 people still living in barracks! Something like 375,000 out of an original approximately 600,000 homeless still not permanently housed. And it is now more than 2 years since the tsunami!)

Rebuilding elsewhere

I will try and check these figures and give any updated figures I get in future entries – but the situation is clearly not good here in Aceh. As far as I know everyone has now been rehoused in Thailand (when Children’s World International was there in December 2005/January 2006, almost everyone, including those in Khao Lak, had been permanently rehoused.) In Sri Lanka, as I understand it, rebuilding is going pretty well (it certainly was in the South and West when we were there in November/December 2005) but I imagine that because of the Tamil troubles, rebuilding may well be going more slowly on the East and North coasts of Sri Lanka.

Where the funding went

Aceh province received 60% of the entire tsunami death and destruction – yet they only received 31% of the British Disasters Emergency Committee monies given by the British public. (These are DEC’s own figures from their Report on their spending – they say they are going to try and raise this giving figure to 40% - well, as far as I am concerned, that’s not enough – if Aceh received 60% of the damage, surely they should receive 60% of the British funding!?) Sri Lanka and Thailand probably also received a lot of private donations – “Oh, I know that beach, we’ve been on holiday there – it could be us dead, we must give something” syndrome. Aceh has never really had tourists as there was a state of civil war, or at least dangerous troubles and insurgency, for many years until the August 2005 signing of a peace treaty between GAM and the Government. So they obviously did not receive any of these private “tourist” donations.

Silver lining

Aceh needs more money, and it deserves more money. They found the magic “silver lining” of the tsunami and made peace (the “Conflict” which lasted many years has probably caused even more trauma in Aceh than did the tsunami). Oh that the Tamils and the Sri Lankan Government could do the same!

There have recently been bad reports about Aceh and the rebuilding in the English press, including the Sunday Times, saying that money has been misappropriated (a perennial problem not just in Aceh but in almost any 3rd world country, sadly) and about the Shariya Police getting hold of aid funding to finance their work, and there being beatings of women etc. I am very alarmed that reports of this sort may reduce aid to Aceh. There are obvious difficulties – but so far we have not seen or heard of the Shariya police. People, many of them still living in extremely difficult conditions, are going about their lives as well as they possibly can. They are open-hearted, good people and they deserve support – I really hope that what they need will be forthcoming!

What the barracks are like

The “barracks” must be extremely hard to live in. They are long rows of joined wooden rooms on stilts with a small balcony in front. Each family has one room, which measures approximately 3m x 4m. Sanitation is poor and drainage bad, which means that it gets very muddy and dirty in the rainy season. Rubbish everywhere (though this is prevalent in the area, not just in the barracks.)

Saiful tells us that houses have been built for some of the people in the barracks that we visited today – but that there are problems with the electricity and the sanitation and that people are not prepared to move into the houses until they have been improved. There are also apparently some people who do not want to move out of the barracks because they get various “hand-outs” of rice, money, etc. while they are in the barracks, and they don’t feel they can manage without these. Imagine needing "hand-outs" so much that you are prepared to live with your family in a 3m x 4m space rather than move out to a house of your own!

Bottom of the pecking order

Often the new houses are built away from the roads, whereas the barracks are right on the roads, which makes transport easier for the inmates - easier to travel to town and to work, etc. There is also the problem of those who did not have their own land or their own houses before the tsunami – most of the big NGO’s only seem to be geared up to be able to build new houses for people who already have land to build it on – when we get down to the Teunom area, I really want to look at the possibility of the Festival money buying some land so that houses can be built for these disenfranchised people who were always at the bottom of the pecking scale.

So there are many problems here still. It is all very worrying – I will write more as I find out more.

Write, gentle reader

So it is now 10.45 am. I am just going to finish this bit of diary (though we won’t be able to get it up on the web until Sunday – actually I am not sure if any diary has gone up on the web yet! And even if it has, I don’t know if anyone is reading it. Still, a record needs to be kept of our Tour, so this is as good a way of keeping that record as any, even if no one reads it. But, gentle reader, (as Miss Austen would say ), if you do read this, do drop us a line to bellachurchill@hotmail.com and send us some words of encouragement!

	Muslim Aid helpers and some of their friends
A 'cat' just about to catch the 'mouse' in a parachute game led by Haggis

Technology

Soon we need to go out to the ATM and see if the credit cards now work again – if not, we will have to change some of the Euros we have at the bank. We need to get more paper for badge-making, and then I will trot along to the Internet Office and get my hotmails and reply to them (though I am not going to risk sending any files through their virus-ey computers as it obviously doesn’t work!)

Then we must grab some lunch (probably the great noodle soup again) and hopefully Arwin will arrive at 2.45 pm (everyone seems to be making a huge effort to get us to the show on time today after my expression of our disgruntlement yesterday, thank goodness!) Hopefully Arwin will also arrive WITH the car. Fingers crossed! I’ll write more later.

Later: The cards still won’t get us any money out of the ATM – I must ring Chris later and get her to ring my bank. Thank goodness we have some Euros with us – British Pounds for some reason don’t go down well here – they only like Euros or American Dollars.

The tremendous banner that Muslim Aid have had made for the tour. It gets hung up at each show.

The noodle stall is closed – it is Friday, the day most people go to the Mosque to pray, and the centre of town is pretty quiet. We go down to the Internet Shop, but it is shut – so we have rice and a green spinach sate dish at a nearby stall and a couple of shrimp cakes – very nice. Then we notice that the door to the Internet Office is ajar so we peep in, and goody-goody I can get a cubicle straight away. My elation soon deflates as it takes half an hour to get onto hotmail, then once I have seen the messages in my inbox, I keep getting disconnected and have to start again from scratch. After another half hour I give up in disgust and head back to our house. I will do all my intenet work when we get back to Banda on Saturday night and early Sunday morning early, before we go and do our first show and session for the Red Cross.

No seatbelts

A mini-rest in the air-con cool of our bedroom and then, yes, at 2.45 on the dot Arwin arrives – yeeha! No car with him, but minutes later that arrives too, and we are on our way by 3.00 which means we will be in good time. We know the road between Sigli and Trieng Gadeng very well now as this is our 3rd trip. Thankfully this time there is no rush, and the driver goes far slower and we can appreciate the views of rice fields rather than be tensed for an accident (to be avoided if humanly possible, as there are no seatbelts!)

Another appalling floor

We arrive at Desa Mbeu Barrack in Trieng Gadeng at about 3.45. A nice size balai, and there is power – but again there is a truly appalling floor – lots of gaps between the pieces of ply and many areas that feel very loose and bouncy. There are 60 families in this barrack, and they have all been here for more than 2 years. I am going to suggest to Saiful that Muslim Aid should consider repairing the floors of the balais in the barracks where people will be remaining for some time. It shouldn’t be an expensive job, and it would show people that they were cared for and not forgotten. If they haven’t got the money to do, maybe they could cost it and some of Michael’s Festival money could be spent on this. I do think there is going to be a nasty accident otherwise soon, and they do need their balais as communal space – the rooms the families inhabit are so small, and it is really vital that there is some good shared space so that the community feel “together”.

I’ll see what can be done about this.

	Haggis mid-show, possibly on the verge of falling through the rotten wooden floor
Me, surrounded by keen badge-makers.
	The sugar cane lady with her ancient wooden sugar press

Despite being so good and early, there are lots of children already waiting for us, neatly sat down, so we start the session early at about 4.00 pm. Haggis runs some wildly successful parachute games (though our hearts are rather in our mouths, as the floor really could collapse at any moment!), which the children adore. Making an “igloo” and sitting in the coloured light inside is very much enjoyed as are “Cat and Mouse” and “Parachute Football”.

Badges

I start badge-making with the adults and teenagers who aren’t involved in the parachute games – some seem to have been given many too many bits of paper badge centres – but hey, we have masses of components and prepared bits with us, so I don’t mind. Once the children have finished their games with Haggis, they come and make their badges while Hags has a little rest and makes sure the sound system is working. Thanks to being able to translate through the many Muslim Aid workers, we are able to get the children to leave their completed designs with me and I make them up while they watch Haggis’s show. Hags is very funny today – really his clowning is getting better and better. He drops a bit when juggling today, but quite honestly it doesn’t matter, as the children find this hilariously funny! A very nice audience, who clearly really appreciate our being there. There are so many badges to make that I don’t get to stop until about 10 minutes after the show is finished. Must have made at least 250 today. I would guess that the audience consisted of about 100 children, 50 older teenagers and 100 adults.

Group photo

Big group photo at the end of the show in front of the splendid Muslim Aid/Children’s World International banner – the young Muslim Aid workers are very keen on documenting everything, which is great as it means we should land up with some good pictures – I was so tied to the badge machine today, I hardly managed to take any.

Sugar cane seller

Fond goodbyes, and back into the 4 x 4. Suddenly Arwin’s mobile phone shrills and we screech to a stop – Saiful wants to buy us all a drink and we pile out onto the benches of a little roadside stall. Joy of joys – it is a sugar cane juice stall – our very favourite drink (there is a sugar-cane juice seller on one of the main roundabouts in Banda, and whenever passing we stop to get a plastic bag full of this delicious nectar). Instead of the more modern wheel-type crushing machines, the lady here was a wonderful old cane juice press made entirely of wood, which she operates by stamping on a wooden paddle on the floor while feeding the stalks in by hand and then doubling up the fibres and pressing them again. I worry that this continuous movement with her right leg is going to give her problems in her right hip later (I sympathise, as I have problems in my right hip). Haggis has a go at operating the machine, and I suddenly had a flashback to an instance many years ago, near the top of a mountain near Lake Pokhara in Nepal, when he had a go at ploughing a field with a small metal plough pulled by an ox. A very hands-on man, my Haggis! Delicious coconut rice, roughly the size of a matchbox neatly packaged in banana leaf. It was a very welcome break.

Back to the house for a very quick shower and then out to another Kentucky chicken dinner with nasi goring (Haggis is addicted to the chicken at this stall) and back home for an early night.

Negotiating with the bank

Call my assistant in England and she says she has spoken to my bank about the credit cards, but that they need to talk to me not her. She gives me a number to ring and they say they don’t have anything “flagged up” about these cards – and that I should try them again at the ATM tomorrow and ring them again if there is still a problem. Do hope this is going to work out. We can live on the Euros for a bit, but sooner or later we will need to use the cards. Fingers crossed!

Today was a good day – Muslim Aid made great efforts to get us there on time and succeeded. The parachute games, badge-making and show all went really well and we feel that everyone at the barrack really enjoyed themselves. Happily to sleep.