Tsunami-Tossed City’s Survivors Struggle to Carry On

“This is it,” said Safrial, a carpenter, to his two young sons when a towering tsunami of black water rushed toward them two years ago. “This is the end of the world.”

For most people who lived around him it was, and today Mr. Safrial, 45, who uses only one name, hammers and sweats in the sun in a neighborhood where he knows the names of more of the dead than of the living.

He hammers constantly, even as he talks. “This was a test from God,” he said. “For those who died, it was disaster. But for the survivors, we must pass the test and become better people in every way.”


Not everybody has met the challenge, he said. Across Aceh Province, where the tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, hit the hardest, the process of recovery has been a mixture of progress and disappointment.

All across the ravaged cityscape, scraped bare by the waves, thousands of tiny, toy-box houses have sprung up in recent months as a program of rebuilding gains momentum. But many of the new houses are empty because they lack water, sanitation and electricity and because there are no schools, clinics or commercial activity nearby. Many of the people whose homes they replaced were swept away to their deaths.


Old landmarks are gone, and it is bewildering to trace a remembered path through this sketch of a city. At night the heart of the ruined area is almost as dark and silent as it was before construction started. This rebuilt city of ghosts seems like a ghost town.

The tsunami, caused by an earthquake off the shore of Aceh, took 230,000 lives and left nearly two million people homeless in more than a dozen nations — large numbers in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand as well as here in Indonesia.

from the NY Times