26th January, 2006

DAVID ADAMS

Naomi Toole was still studying at university when the tsunami swept across parts of southern Asia on Boxing Day, 2004. Only a few months later the 23-year-old from Geelong, south of Melbourne, was in Aceh, Indonesia, helping to direct the rebuilding and relief efforts.

Toole first arrived in Aceh, Indonesia, in late March last year and, but for two short breaks spent back in Australia, has been continuously working there. Originally employed under a contract with UK-based Christian humanitarian organisation Tearfund, she was then seconded to another Christian humanitarian organisation, World Relief, which is working in alliance with Tearfund.

IN GOOD COMPANY: Naomi Toole with some of her new-found friends in Meulaboh, Aceh. “The camps were just full to bursting and whole coastlines were just devoid of any kind of vegetation except for sick looking palm trees...There were still lots of personal belongings everywhere and people rummaging through, trying to salvage things from homes that had once been there,” says Toole of what she saw on arriving in Aceh last March.

“It really was God’s timing in it all,” she says. “I hadn’t even really finished university - I’d been doing international relations at Deakin University in Geelong and sort of working my way towards an internship with an organisation. I’d had some experience in administration and I’d been learning Indonesian at university - doing it as a major. Then a friend of mine went and did some consultation work with Tearfund in Aceh and took my resume with him and they sent it on to head office in London and I got a call from them and they said we’d like to interview you.”

While most of the bodies had been well and truly cleared away by the time she arrived, Toole - who finished her university degree as an internship during her first six months in Aceh - says there was still a great deal of debris lying around and small cities of tents erected to house those who lost their homes.

“The camps were just full to bursting and whole coastlines were just devoid of any kind of vegetation except for sick looking palm trees..." she says.

"There were still lots of personal belongings everywhere and people rummaging through, trying to salvage things from homes that had once been there. So it was still fairly intense even though there was anything really gory confronting you.”

Toole, who never hesitated in taking on the role (“it’s definitely where I’m meant to be and what I’m meant to be doing,” she says) was posted down to Meulaboh, to the south of Banda Aceh, where she works as area administrator, co-ordinating staff and liaising with head office and other locally based NGOs.

She says World Relief is involved in a number of different rebuilding projects in the area including rebuilding houses and a local school as well as agricultural projects aimed at revitalising devastated padi fields and enabling farmers to get back to work on their land. They’re also involved in boat building and the training of volunteer community health workers who are then sent into the nearby villages to help people.

You still have to look for it, she says, but positive change is happening.

“There’s lots and lots of houses that have gone up in the last four months, the camps look a lot less full - there’s people who have obviously moved out and moved into new homes. There’s a real feeling of prosperity when you walk through the town too - people have got their shops open, there’s lots more products coming through and there’s a lot more people shopping so, yes, you can really tell that things are looking up.”

Toole says the most challenging aspect of her role in Indonesia relates to the relationships she has built with the local people.

“World Relief and Tearfund are firm believers in not proselytising in relief (work),” she says. “So for me, as a Christian, trying to be all that I am and trying to keep my relationship with God as not something that I put on but something that I am - that’s a huge challenge and I’ve grown incredibly in the last year in that sort of thing.”

“Sometimes it’s more difficult than others because there’s lots of difference between Muslim and Christian and Australian and Indonesian but the relationships are really precious. They are challenging, but worth all of the effort in the long run.”

Toole says there are also times when she just has to get on with the job “in the face of so much grief and so much pain”.

“But, in a way, that’s what you have to do. If you fell apart and burst into tears every time you were faced with someone else’s grief, then you wouldn’t be able to help them in the way that you need to. The reason you’re there is to be that strength for them.”

Toole says that she has appreciated being the shoulder for people to cry, adding that understanding the local language has been vital.

“You can just sit there and listen and not even say anything because they know that nothing you can do is going to make it any better. But they know you have compassion for them and that you care for them.”

One story which really touched her surrounded that of a man whose wife went into labour on the morning of the tsunami and ended up having her baby on the roof of the nursing school that her husband headed.

“They got down off the roof two hours later and he hurt his leg, so he couldn’t walk. So this woman carried her newborn baby through water with bodies floating all around her and she walked two kilometre’s to the nearest clinic to get some help,” Toole recalls.

“That kind of strength is beyond comprehension. This woman, I’ve met her, she is just sweet and lovely and her baby is perfectly healthy. They called him ‘blessing of the tsunami’.”

Toole’s family spent three years doing missionary work in Uganda, Africa, starting when she was aged nine (her father now works with Samaritan’s Purse in South East Asia). She says that while at the time she vowed “never to leave Australia again”, the time she spent in Africa helped to open her eyes to a wider world.

“I think it must have really given me a bigger world perspective, a bigger world view, so that when I came to make decisions at highschool about what courses I wanted to do, I found the only courses I was interested in were the ones the involved helping people and being overseas. It just sort of led me into this rather than knowing all the time that this was what I wanted to do.”

Toole says one lesson she’s learnt from her experience in Aceh is that “tragedy tends to bring out the best in people".

"That is an incredible thing to witness and to be a part of," she says. “There’s always going to be disasters, there’s always going to be tragedies like this and yet it brings out the humanity and the compassion in people when the world tends to be an impersonal kind of place sometimes.”

Toole says she had never imagined she would be able to move into work on the frontline so quickly.

“But it seems God has other plans,” she says. “I’ll be interested to see where I’ll be in five years time.”

~ www.tearfund.org

~ www.wr.org