Tsunami disaster – countries in crisis

‘First response’ to the tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia

UNICEF's Gordon Weiss reflects on what he saw as a 'first response' emergency officer in Aceh, Indonesia, after the tsunami.

By Gordon Weiss

Women and children in a Banda Aceh relief shelter.

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, January 2005 – Where did Christmas go? Here I was, four days after the tsunami, surveying the effects of nature’s hammer blow to human existence, and looking into the eyes of people who had lost just about everything they had known for all their lives.

The town looked like an old mariner’s map come to life. The gods of wind and water had conspired with the monsters of the sea to consume the land of Aceh.
 
As the emergency communications officer with the United Nations Children’s Fund in its New York headquarters, one aspect of my job is to reach emergencies quickly, and to start telling the story. But it was two days before I had enough time to do so, because we – the relief workers - were so few on the ground, and there was so much other work to be done.
 
My two Indonesian colleagues and I were the first from UNICEF to arrive, and there were perhaps half a dozen other United Nations personnel on the ground. We had to quickly absorb the scale of the destruction, and then lay the foundation of our operation, which was a seemingly hopeless task.
 
I hitched a ride with Anton Susanto, who is based in Jakarta, and we drove as far as we could get into the Indonesian countryside, following roads just cleared by the Indonesian army, towards the tsunami destruction. We hired three-tonne pickup truck along the way (the UNICEF vehicles and office had been wiped-out by the wave). Then we surveyed villagers out in the fringes, asking them about their experiences in the tsunami.

We interviewed people in relief camps to discover where they had come from, the names and locations of their villages, the number of survivors, the condition of the children, the number of children without parents, and the wounds people had sustained. We looked at wells to determine water quality, checked food supplies, and assessed the shelters people were using.
 
We drove into the hills where rebels were rumoured to operate and encountered streams of displaced people crossing the mountains to escape the devastation of the isolated western coast of Aceh.

And as we drove, from village to path to well to camp, we were sometimes the first aid workers people had seen. We delivered what aid we had been able to scrounge - tarpaulins, body bags, and jerry cans - while our other Indonesian colleague, Budi Subianto, delivered start-up health kits to hospitals in Banda Aceh.
 
We tried to discern whether people thought they would go back to their villages – an important point, since a displaced population on the move is difficult to serve. But people were too upset to even consider the notion. “The sea has eaten everything, even our land,” said one old man to me, his voice choked with tears.
 
And eventually we found a room to sleep in, more vehicles for hire, and a base for UNICEF operations - even a noodle shop and (after five or six days) a cold can of Coke.
 
Every aid worker carries the same guilty burden in a disaster: We can always leave and we always do. We come and go, leaving people to cope with their lives as best they can. But the organization stays and that's the great thing about UNICEF.