Tsunami Survivors Thankful for Aid

Surrounded by wood shavings, a 50-year-old Indonesian named Martunis is busy nailing sheets of tin and spreading tar onto the hull of a wooden fishing boat lying by the Indian Ocean.

All the materials, down to the tools and the blue tarp shading him from the baking sun, were donated by Mercy Corps, a U.S.-based charity, which is paying him $3.50 a day to mend boats that were damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that struck Dec. 26.

Martunis, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, is only vaguely aware where the aid is coming from; he can barely pronounce the words Mercy Corps, and doesn’t know that it’s headquartered in the United States and Scotland.

But as he cups an aromatic clove cigarette in his gnarled hands, Martunis says he’s grateful.

“We don’t know what would have happened if nobody had come to help us,” he said.

From noodles and rice to shovels and ice, the unprecedented outpouring of money for disaster victims is being spent to keep survivors healthy and slowly breathe new life into their crippled economies.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, has vaccinated more than 200,000 Indonesian children against measles and distributed 1 million sachets of oral rehydration salts to treat diarrhea sufferers.

It has given out nearly 33,000 family sanitation kits of such basics as soap, toothbrushes and sanitary napkins. Each costs $15.

And just as the emergency phase of their work was winding down in Aceh, the hardest-hit province of Sumatra island, UNICEF and others scrambled teams again March 29, when another huge earthquake shook northern Sumatra and a string of smaller Indonesian islands.

In Aceh, more than 126,000 people died, tens of thousands are missing and more than 400,000 are homeless after the December tsunami. It has had help from all over the globe.

A delegation from Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, funded by the city and Turkish citizens, is sweeping streets in the devastated city of Banda Aceh. And it has even shipped in a bakery that turns out 10,000 loaves of bread each day.

British-based Oxfam is employing thousands in Aceh in cash-for-work programs that include home-building and hat-weaving. It distributes women’s underwear and teaches villagers to harvest rainwater.

Red Cross staff from Sweden, Austria and tiny Macedonia are helping provide clean drinking water.

Outside Holy Heart Catholic Church, one of a handful of Christian churches in strictly Islamic Aceh, an Austrian Red Cross filtration plant pumps murky, gray water out of city pipes and the Krueng Aceh river, and turns it into more than 26,000 gallons of safe drinking water each day.

Effective sanitation along with clean drinking water have been key to preventing major outbreaks of disease that experts initially feared could double the death toll.

Tanker trucks take thousands of gallons of water each day to outlying villages and survivor camps, and the Red Cross has set up 12 faucets by a busy city street.

Zulhairian Musfi Kar, 10, pulls up on his battered bicycle and begins filling two plastic jerrycans and the discarded jug from a water cooler, which he’ll send home in one of the scooters with sidecars that serve as taxis in these parts.

“This is water for my family; we have nowhere else to get it,” he said. “I come here every day before school to pick it up.”

Some of the help is costly. The Austrian Red Cross, which raised more than $26.5 million, most of it from private donations, reckons that its water filtration unit will cost as much as $1 million for a four-month deployment in Banda Aceh.

On the other hand, $200 enables Red Cross workers to buy and install a well and hand pump to provide water for 110 people.

Often, national arms of the charity apply for government funding for their relief operations, but after the tsunami, many local Red Cross appeals were inundated with private donations.

“In this particular appeal, the outstanding thing is that the majority of funding has come from individuals,” said Virgil Grandfield, spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the umbrella group for national Red Cross and Red Crescent groups.

The suffering in Aceh province is still on an epic scale. Even three months after the disaster, thousands of families remain crammed into stifling tents in cramped camps, surviving on water and meager rations.

U.N.-linked organizations are funding their tsunami programs from a $977-million appeal launched by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to which governments sent taxpayers’ dollars, but also from private donations.

By mid-March, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF had already given UNICEF $92.6 million, most of which it received in online donations from Americans.

Cash poured into the Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services so fast that it stopped seeking donations for the tsunami in February. To date, the charity has received more than $126 million.

Just outside Meulaboh, some of that money is being put to work helping survivors put temporary roofs over their heads.

In a field close to the remains of dozens of shattered homes, workers from Catholic Relief Services and another Catholic group, Caritas Australia, are assembling kits made up of 20 bags of cement, corrugated zinc sheets, a saw, shovel, carpentry tools and boxes of nails that families can use to build temporary shelters. They cost $450-$500 each.

Indonesian authorities controlling long-term reconstruction are going to need a whole lot more help in coming years.

Private U.S. donations have topped $1 billion, and President Bush has asked Congress to provide $950 million.

But former President Clinton, a special U.N. envoy for tsunami recovery, has said reconstruction costs could reach $12 billion -- several billion dollars more than the total donations and pledges by governments and individuals.

Jan Egeland, emergency relief coordinator for the United Nations, said 90% of the money Annan asked for in January had been received and mostly spent providing food, shelter and medical help for tsunami survivors. The U.N. World Food Program gives survivors rations of rice, noodles, fish, cooking oil and fortified biscuits.

“It is the first time in the history of U.N. flash appeals that we have got the money so fast,” said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman in Geneva for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “We had a really quick response and real generosity.”

It doesn’t always work that way.

When a powerful earthquake killed 26,000 people in the Iranian city of Bam in December 2003, donors promised $1 billion. A year later, Iran said it had received $17.5 million.

Although the vast majority of aid is getting through in Aceh, there have been isolated allegations of supplies going missing -- some families not getting enough rice, officials inflating casualty lists to get more government money and soldiers illegally charging fees to escort relief convoys. There are rumors that government officials will award lucrative reconstruction contracts to relatives.

“I think isolated is the key word,” U.N. envoy Erskine Bowles said of the corruption claims after a recent visit to Aceh.

“I think anytime you had a disaster of this magnitude, affecting this many people and with the great outpouring of support from the world community, whether it happened here or in Europe or in Africa or other parts of Asia or Latin America or North America, that you would have some isolated incidents of money not ending up where it was intended to,” he said.

“The key is, are you setting up the right accounting, the right transparency so that you can prevent the vast majority of it?” Bowles said.

Indonesia has sought to allay suspicions by using the international accounting firm Ernst & Young to watch over its spending. The company declined to comment on its work for the Indonesian government.

PricewaterhouseCoopers says it has donated 8,000 hours of advisory services to the United Nations to ensure that the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by the world body are not wasted or siphoned off.

“The U.N. expects to direct most of these services toward following up on credible allegations of misuse of the funds,” the company said in a statement.

“I’m sure there will be cases of possible mismanagement, mishandling, but I’m sure also there will be many allegations that may not be correct and that’s why it’s so good to have this kind of investigative tool, because we can quicker, I think, confirm whether there is something wrong or we can confirm that it’s actually nothing wrong,” Egeland said.

Cash-for-work programs are springing up all over Aceh. Survivors whose livelihoods were destroyed are earning a few dollars a day clearing streets, picking up corpses, rebuilding homes and planting coconut trees. Oxfam has paid villagers $4 a day to clear the remains of their settlement, still littered with the remains of lives snuffed out -- CDs, a pink satin dress, splinters of wood that once were homes.

Mercy Corps is employing about 4,500 survivors in and around Meulaboh, getting the region’s fishing fleet back on the water and putting fresh fish on dinner plates.

Its next step -- to buy a $28,000 ice-maker to preserve fishermen’s catches.

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Associated Press writers Beth Gardiner in London and David Pace in Washington contributed to this report.