Ruined Island Looks to Rebuild

Searching through the rubble of his home for anything still whole, Laksmiah M. Poleh can see life’s options quite clearly.

He can give up and move his family back to their home state, more than 1,000 miles away on India’s mainland and, if he’s lucky, find work as a tenant farmer making $35 a month.

Or he can stay on Little Andaman Island and continue to work as a peon, serving tea and running errands in the harbor works department for $180 a month, for as long as the government will keep paying him.

Seen through eyes made red by worry and tears, the choices come down to one. His best chance of surviving, and keeping his family of seven whole, is to keep on trying to live here next to the ocean that has destroyed everything he owned.

“We are scared of the sea now, mostly because we don’t know when the water will come and strike us again,” Poleh said. “But what can we do? We can’t leave this place and go to the mainland. After all, we won’t have anything to eat there.”

Closer to Indonesia than mainland India, Little Andaman Island was once pristine jungle inhabited only by the primitive Onge tribe, which now numbers just over 100. They escaped the waves by fleeing into the dense forest of their tribal reserve.

Settlers from the mainland didn’t fare so well. Most arrived here in the 1970s when a third of the island was opened to timber cutting, and families such as Poleh’s built homes on flat land by the sea. After surviving the tsunami waves, they face a much longer, less dramatic struggle against corruption, broken promises and joblessness.

Their fears, and quiet determination, are common to hundreds of other towns and villages across southern Asia, where at least 5 million survivors are homeless. The United Nations predicts it will take from five to 10 years to repair the damage wrought by the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami.

Two weeks after the waves hammered Hut Bay, little reconstruction aid has reached its people. But working with bare hands and building materials salvaged from the ruins, survivors like Poleh are trying to help themselves.

Hut Bay, on the southeast corner of Little Andaman Island, faces the open ocean northwest of Indonesia. Just a few hundred miles of water and some palm trees stood between Poleh’s neighborhood and the undersea epicenter of a 9-magnitude earthquake off Indonesia’s coast.

The first wave that hit Hut Bay, a town of 12,000, reached about a quarter of a mile inland. The water stopped just above Poleh’s knees, giving him ample warning to join the several thousand people rushing for higher land.

Only 43 people are confirmed dead here, although locals say the final toll probably will be closer to 100. In a country that lost more than 10,000 people to the tsunami waves, Hut Bay’s death toll is low.

But the sense of good fortune soon passed, and in some ways Hut Bay’s survivors now feel more cursed than those who died. The dead don’t need a place to live.

More than 7,000 people here have lost their homes, and at least 3,000 have fled north to live in relief camps in the archipelago’s capital, Port Blair. The government estimates a total of 42,000 people are homeless on the islands.

The tsunami’s second and third waves flattened most of the houses on Poleh’s street, including his. Next door, one room of his brother’s house is still standing.

The ground is covered with pieces of concrete, brick and twisted tin roofing. One wall looks almost as good as the day it was painted with flowers and the words “Good luck” for his brother’s wedding in 2003.

The only essential thing that Poleh, 40, denied the waves is the 3-year-old Hercules bicycle on which he made his escape. Every cent he’d managed to sock away in the years since he inherited the job of office peon after his father’s death was in gold jewelry. He hasn’t found even a fragment of the gold, which was worth $2,400.

Two weeks into the catastrophe, Poleh says the only aid he has received is rations of rice and lentils, and even those are hard to come by.

Like most Indians, Poleh doesn’t have home insurance. He estimates it would cost almost $5,000 to build temporary shelter, at least something more substantial than the plastic tarp his family lives under now. He said the government still hasn’t told him what, if any, help he will get to rebuild his house.

“Well, we will just have to wait for government aid,” he said with a shrug. “I don’t have any money to start reconstruction of my house on my own. I could take out a bank loan, but I don’t know the rules.

“Then again, how would I be able to produce all the documents that are needed to secure a loan? The water has taken away everything. I have to show land ownership documents. I don’t have those anymore.”

Poleh has good reason to be worried about the government’s promises of help.

A year after an earthquake struck India’s Gujarat state in January 2001, killing nearly 20,000 people, survivors were still complaining that government reconstruction aid was too slow, and unfairly distributed when it wasn’t stolen. In Gujarat’s villages, about 35,000 of 145,000 destroyed homes had been reconstructed by the quake’s first anniversary, whereas a few more than 300 of almost 34,000 houses in urban areas had been rebuilt.

Here in Hut Bay, the local administration is in ruins, so a volunteer from New Delhi, Anindo Majumdar, visited the town last week to help assess the needs for the territory’s government. He said almost every public building, including the hospital, was destroyed. Only a government guesthouse, a school and the police stations were standing, but damaged, and the criminal records had washed away, he said.

The waves destroyed one month’s supply of food stored in a warehouse, and looters stole the rest. The town’s power station was ruined, and running water was restored only Thursday. The priorities now are to provide food, clothes and shelter, but the government in Port Blair hasn’t decided yet how to help people rebuild homes, Majumdar said.

“Our immediate task is to provide relief and succor,” he said. “There has to be a rehabilitation plan, but that will take time.”

There was one policy decision the Indian government made much faster in the early hours after the tsunami hit. It told foreign relief workers that they were neither needed nor welcome in the disaster areas. Motivated by national pride, and concern for national security in the strategic shipping lanes and listening posts around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the government wanted to show that it could take care of Indians itself.

Amid complaints that his hard stand on self-reliance was compounding the suffering, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced Thursday that India would accept support from multinational financial institutions such as the World Bank, and private charities, if New Delhi decided it was necessary.

Foreign aid groups are still officially banned from providing direct aid in tsunami-affected areas. But several have sent representatives to Port Blair, the relief hub for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where they are quietly working through Indian nongovernmental organizations.

The restrictions limit the foreign agencies’ ability to strictly monitor distribution, which is the only way to be sure that their aid quickly reaches people who need it most, and doesn’t get lost in a swamp of bureaucracy and corruption.

Despite a huge relief effort by Indian corporations, nongovernmental agencies and the military, many survivors complain that they aren’t getting enough aid, especially in remote places like Hut Bay, which is almost 12 hours by sea from Port Blair.

The island’s lifeline is a rusting, 120-foot ferry called the M.V. Pilokunji, which can carry around 50 tons of food, fuel and other emergency supplies stacked on its foredeck. Captain Gopal Rangaraj has made five trips to Hut Bay, where he waits for the right tide and drops his ship’s steel ramp on the rocky edge of a destroyed dry dock.

On Sunday, he also dropped off a few hundred people who wanted to see if there was anything worth returning to. But when he turned his ship around and headed back to Port Blair that evening, a few hundred more people boarded. They had given up, at least for now, on trying to survive here.

The waves destroyed Selliah Bhumi Raman’s stationery shop and house. He estimates it would cost around $14,000 to replace all that he’s lost and would be happy to get half that amount from the government.

He and his wife and their sons are building a shack on a hill from pieces of ruined buildings that litter the lowlands.

Like many people hammering and sawing in the growing shantytown, Raman fears that corrupt officials are siphoning off relief aid, and he’s angry that his government hasn’t opened the door wide to anyone who wants to lend a hand.

“We want help,” said Raman, 54. “We are in the midst of a crisis. All that we’re worried about is support and help at this stage, from whomever it might come. We need help immediately.”

While the people of Hut Bay struggle to get back on their feet, Nchael Jagannath, 31, has a slight advantage. He is a building contractor. He and a friend salvaged a long wooden beam from ruins down the street, and hauled it on their shoulders to his badly damaged house.

Pausing for a moment, Jagannath wiped his brow and weighed his chances of getting government help. He quickly decided they weren’t very good.

“The top local official, the tehsildar,” he said, “was the first to flee.”