13th February, 2005

World Vision’s Conny Lenneberg recently returned from four weeks in Banda Aceh where she was responsible for framing the organisation’s Australian response in both the immediate and long-term future. She spoke with DAVID ADAMS...

Was it as bad as you expected to be when you arrived?
“You just cannot comprehend the scale of what’s happened until you’re standing amongst it. Just the incredible power of nature to come in something like eight kilometres into the city and wipe out everything in its path: whole communities completely obliterated. There is nothing left standing, the only evidence that people were there are the floor slabs and tiles on the houses that were more substantial. The rest is just wreckage and wreckage full of the bodies of people and all sorts of belongings. It just beggars belief - you just can’t believe it until you see it.”

It was a tough experience?
“It is tough because you can’t separate yourself from people who’ve had this kind of thing happen to them; just the total bewilderment which this community feels. To have everything that they know and understand and love about where they live and who there community is just taken away from them is something that I think is really hard to understand.”

Part of your job was to assess the needs there. What are the essential needs?
“There are the immediate ones responding to basic need requirements - people need safe water, they need food, they need shelter, they need access to medical care...As a child-focused agency we’re also looking at the needs of children and their families. So one of the most important initiatives that we do which are perhaps a little bit different is to provide what are called child-friendly spaces - to move very quickly in an emergency situation and to look at providing children with a safe place where they can come together, where they can play, where they can resume learning, where they can through creative activities begin to really explore what they’re experienced to help relieve their anxiety by working with their peers and their teachers. What we’ve found in other places is that one of the best ways to respond to the psycho-social needs of children is to provide them with an environment with their is some stability and normalcy. By doing that, you’re also responding to the needs of the parents because you don’t have a lot of children who are just getting into trouble with no-where to go and who are being distressed. You’ve actually got a program for them to engage their interest and their time...”

“But moving out from that response, we’re looking at how to do we improve the shelter options. Because so much has been destroyed and because the Government is now thinking about is it safe to allow people to rebuild in some of these areas - in some villages the land has just been torn away by the ocean so it’s just not there anymore so for many people there the question of where they can go back to is a big question that will take quite a while to resolve. So there are issues of temporary shelter, there are issues surrounding people who can go back to their land to rebuild. So we’re looking at a range of options for that including construction kits to help people rebuild their own homes, working with the government in building temporary accomodation centres, transition centres where they can live in wooden structures for up to one and a half, two years. We were looking at micro-enterprise development programs in the long-term to enable people to get back on their feet - and that includes very small business people, people who were in the market cooking things for sale or selling vegetables. We were looking at reconstruction of schools and health centres - something like 400 health centres were destroyed in the Aceh province as a whole so there were enormous losses of normal social physical assets for the community so we were working with the Government in restoring some of that. So there are multiple strategies in terms of recovery through to reconstruction phases.”

I gather that children were the largest group affected by the disaster. Those children that you saw there, what’s been their response? Do they understand what’s happened?
“I don’t know whether they understand. They’re certainly aware of what a tsunami is - a wave. Children were given pieces of paper and colouring books and coloured pencils and many of them would draw the tsunami and it was quite shocking to see those drawings with the same theme repeated again and again - an enormous wave with lots of stick figures floating around in it and trees and houses and everything being submerged. So they’re certainly very well aware of what actually happened. How they make sense of it is difficult to say, I expect it depends on their age and what they’ve actually lost. But the thing that surprised me is the resilience of children. They do process things and our expectation from the professionals who are working with them is that given the right environment for these children, they’re not going to necessarily develop long-term psychological problems. If you can work with them now and provide them with the kind of support which is really critical to them in these early phases, you can actually enable them to make a really good recovery from the trauma that they’ve experienced. That’s the psychological dimension but there’s also the physical dimension - just having somewhere to live, having a school that you can attend again, having a neighbourhood to play in. All of that will take time to re-establish.”

Are you seeing signs of normality returning now to Banda Aceh and the province?
“You are. One of the really disorienting things there is that part of the town of Banda Aceh was not touched. It’s almost like there was a line through the middle of the town and one part of it was completely wiped away or severely damaged and in other parts you wouldn’t actually know you were necessarily in an area that had suffered a natural disaster. So in those areas that haven’t been touched, the bazaars are operating again, there are businesses going on. But there is that sense that everybody has been affected, everybody has lost members of their family, the whole economy is very fragile because half of it has been ripped away, the skilled labour force has been affected, the administration, the community leaders. All of those things will take a very long time to address.”

Were there any stories that particularly touched you?
“There are so many. One of the stories is on a young woman translator with us and her sister and niece - a little girl less than two years old - they saw the tsunami coming and the husband and the wife picked up the child and they were trying to run up the stairs and the husband had his wife’s hand but she was swept away and her other hand was around the baby. One of our drivers, he’s lost 23 members of his family. People in the community who we worked with, they’re running around with photos - still desperate after four weeks and putting photos up in public places and hoping that someone will recognise the member of the family that’s still living. It’s overwhelming.”

How important is your own face when you go into a situation like that to help?
“Well, you draw on your faith to give you the strength to continue; to be able to respond to what you see as those needs and to hope that you can make a positive difference in allowing people to meet those basic needs.”

Hope is pretty important in such a situation, isn’t it? I guess when you arrive at somewhere like Banda Aceh and see the destruction there, it’s easy to fall into despair.
“It is but people are remarkable. To see people who have lost so much to be able to pick themselves up again (is amazing). They have a very strong faith and that faith nurtures them as well and enables them to pick themselves up and to begin each day anew and to begin rebuilding their own lives out of the most incredible devastation.”