Relief Is Hard to Come by in Hard-Hit City

Ramida Kamun is living in a refugee camp, but she’s surviving mainly on her wits, not handouts. Crouching over a fire under a black tarpaulin, the 52-year-old stirs instant noodles in a pot.

She does her own cooking, in a pot she scavenged from a neighbor’s destroyed house. She found her own firewood too. “We have to do everything for ourselves,” Kamun said.

Others at this camp at the City Hall in Meulaboh are even less fortunate. Nearby, some children nibble on small packages of instant noodles. They don’t have a pot or water to cook them in, so they eat them dry.

“I’m begging for water every day, but I’m not getting much,” said Putri Afdar, 20, another resident of the camp.

It is a constant refrain. Despite the unprecedented international relief effort, many of the victims here in this battered coastal city say they are getting little or no aid. Relief rarely makes it to outlying villages and even neighborhoods just beyond the city center where roads are still washed out.

People who want food aid have to travel to a refugee center. Some complain bitterly that the Indonesian army, which is distributing the international aid, is playing favorites or even keeping some aid for itself.

“I saw it with my own eyes. The aid goes to the military base, but we are not getting any,” said Carifuddin, 46, a retired police officer who lives in a badly hit middle-class neighborhood near the city center that has been cut off by flooding and collapsed buildings.

It takes an hour to get to a refugee center on foot and then there is a two-hour wait to get a small amount of food -- usually instant noodles, or one or two small soda bottles filled with rice, he said.

“We are grateful to the international community for the aid. But the problem is with the distribution. Some people get it, and some don’t,” Carifuddin said.

On Saturday, the president of the World Bank, which has already pledged $250 million in aid, said the organization’s assistance could increase beyond $1 billion if needed.

In Washington, President Bush outlined the ways the U.S. was helping tsunami victims and urged Americans to continue making donations to private relief organizations.

“I urge all Americans to contribute as they are able,” the president said in his weekly radio address.

On the ground in Meulaboh, there appeared to be a catch-as-catch-can quality to the distribution of humanitarian assistance.

A truck dumped a large load of donated clothing in the center of town, but only those lucky enough to be there would get any.

Indonesian authorities responsible for distributing aid acknowledged that there were still many bugs in the system.

“Nearly all the people in the refugee camps get food, but people who move to their relatives’ houses don’t get distribution,” said Tajudin Marlian, a member of the Meulaboh planning board.

He also confirmed that the Indonesian army was keeping some aid, but said it was understandable given that many homes in a large neighborhood of military barracks were washed away by the tsunami.

“They have their own needs,” Marlian said. “Their people were hurt too.”

The top Indonesian military commander for the relief effort here, Col. Lantara Geerhan, said Saturday that none of the aid was being kept by the military.

Geerhan said any delays in distribution had to do with difficulty in opening up land routes to remote towns on the coast.

“There are still some places we can only get to by sea or by air,” he said.

This morning, the first Marines reached Meulaboh. Col. Tom Greenwood said they would be bringing tents and plastic sheeting by helicopter later today to the refugees.

Meulaboh lies on the closest land point to the epicenter of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami and has suffered perhaps the most damage.

Out of a population of about 100,000, more than 20,000 people were believed killed and more than half of the survivors left homeless.

But in fact, everybody here is a victim. Even those physically unscathed are now suffering because the waves obliterated the roads to the city, leaving it isolated.

There is no running water and no telephone service; electricity is available in only a few neighborhoods for part of the day.

There are long queues at the city’s sole gas station, which has hiked its prices tenfold since the disaster.

Food prices have skyrocketed as well.

The markets have slim pickings of bananas, coconuts and green vegetables.

Despite the miles of lovely palm-fringed beachfront, there are virtually no fish available. The waves smashed to splinters pretty blue-and-red wooden fishing boats that once filled the harbor. Most of the fishermen are dead.

“There are no more boats, no nets, not even hooks. All we have are our own bodies,” fish merchant Muzaki, 40, said Saturday.

With no other source of income, he was pushing a cart down the beach, collecting scraps of aluminum from destroyed houses -- a pot lid here, a window frame there -- to be sold as scrap metal.

A rich businessman, he said, had recruited many unemployed men from the fish market to salvage the metal.

“I’ve got to feed my family after all,” said Muzaki, a father of three.

All members of his family survived the tsunami, but they lost their home.

Red Cross crews excavating corpses out of the rubble work alongside the shopkeepers who are digging out the rubbish in hope of soon reopening for business.

There is a constant sound of hammers pounding and shovels scraping. Across the city, bonfires burn with debris.

A few miles inland from the devastated beachfront neighborhoods, shops and even street-front restaurants are starting to reopen.

“The people have to move on,” said Patrick Hourtane, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. “Now is the time that we have to think about how the people will come back to normal life.”