- About 400,000 Indonesians have no home nearly three months after the tsunami. They live in camps for displaced people, surviving on donations of food, clothing and medicine. Temporary camps are set up in front of government offices, in schools and mosques. With so many living in such squalid conditions, officials fear that disease will spread. In some areas of Aceh Province, there are 1,000 people for every toilet.
Ruwaida Ibrahim claps her hands and jumps up and down in the middle of the homeless camp, where she lives with about 600 other people.
Two strangers with a car and a camera have agreed to take her to her home a half-mile away.
Ibrahim, 53, wants to be photographed in front of the home she owned for a year after moving from southern Indonesia for her government job. She never got a picture of the house that sits about 1,500 feet from the beach
“I have no memories,” she says in broken English. “I want memories.”
Ibrahim is the secretary of the IDP camp — or internally displaced person’s camp – that’s been set up in the entryway of a city government building. It’s among the hundreds of homeless communities at mosques, government buildings and schools.
Ibrahim wears a white T-shirt that bears the name of a French aid group. She sleeps on a rattan mat given to her by another charity and covers herself with a blanket from the International Organization for Mobilization.
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Her food comes in rations from the aid groups that regularly send trucks to the camp to unload boxes filled with bottles of water, milk and packages of instant noodles. Her job is to divide the rations among the families in the camp, so everyone gets an equal share.
She is finishing handing out bottles of water to a line of fellow victims when she spots the woman with a camera.
“Can you take a picture of my house?” she asks.
A jubilant Ibrahim climbs into the back seat of a sport-utility vehicle for the ride from a part of Banda Aech that was untouched by the waves into the heart of the destruction. Row after row of the remains of wrecked homes sit next to piles of debris and mounds of mud. Water still covers streets. In every direction are masses of twisted metal, concrete, lumber, tires, crumpled cars, ovens, sandals, cell phones and bodies.
As the car turns a corner, Ibrahim’s voice rises.
“That’s my house,” she shouts, pointing to a white, stucco one-level structure on the corner. “That’s my house.”
Ibrahim leaps from the car.
Her hand rises to her face and covers her mouth.
“That’s my house,” she says as tears fall.
She had left for early prayers on Dec. 26 with her husband, heading to the mosque on the back of his motorcycle. They left their two sons at home.
One son survived the tsunami, her 15-year-old. They found him six days later in a hospital.
They’ve never found their other son, 20-year-old Teger Juliandi Bangun or “Andi.”
Ibrahim’s home now barely stands. The interior looks as if it has been attacked with mortars. The ceiling is caved in. The outside wall of her 15-year-old son’s room is missing. His blue bunk bed is turned over and smashed into another wall.
Most of her belongings are gone. Mud lies three feet deep. A tire rests in the living room, which is a jumble of wood planks from the ceiling and broken furniture. Most of what is inside isn’t hers; it came from other homes.
Outside, homes look as if they have been chopped in half or blown to bits. Streets are gone. Graffiti scrawled on buildings calls workers to remove bodies. It’s like this for acres and acres and hundreds of miles.
Ibrahim, who wears donated clothes, says her mission is to find her son and help her countrymen.
“When I know my son is lost, I say in my heart, I must help many people,” she says. “It makes me feel better. All I can do now is help people.”
She steps out the door, turns her face to the street and asks the photographer to take the picture. She dries her eyes and stares ahead with a solemn but proud face.
“This was my home,” she says.
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| Post / Helen H. Richardson |
| Ruwaida stands outside her ruined home.
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