Slow rebirth comes to a wounded land

LEUGEU, Indonesia -- In a small village bordered by bright green fields of rice, several hundred people gathered outside Cut Dian's home for her wedding feast earlier this month. Dian's parents, her five siblings, and more than 50 other relatives awaited her husband.

When Mohammed Daoud Abdullah arrived in an embroidered blue robe and a pointy, princely hat, he wore a face of stone that hid the swirl of emotions inside him. No family member stood by him. The tsunami had drowned them all, including his first wife and their 8-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.

So the survivors of his coastal village, Leupung, escorted him to his bride. ''They are my family now," Abdullah said later.

One year after a cataclysmic 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia caused waves up to 90 feet high that devoured coastal communities in 13 nations and killed more than 230,000 people, life across the wounded lands is undergoing a slow but vast rebirth.

Widowers are remarrying, couples are conceiving, and nature is renewing itself. Vines sprouting pink wildflowers are crawling over the concrete floors of homes swept away.

Most important, private charities and governments are laying the ground for building tens of thousands of new houses from Somalia to Indonesia in the coming months, thanks to an unprecedented outpouring of generosity last Christmas season from people around the world who were stunned and horrified by the dimensions of a calamity never seen in their lifetimes.

People who could not find Indonesia on a map or who had never before heard the word tsunami were suddenly giving substantial amounts of their savings to the emergency response, $5 billion in all, while governments pledged an additional $8 billion.

''One of the most extraordinary aspects of this disaster is that there is a very real connection between the person trying to help someone on the ground and the person that gave the money," said UNICEF spokesman John Budd, who has spent several months in the tsunami areas. ''All of us felt the impact."

The Dec. 26 tsunami would be just the first in a series of horrendous disasters, from famine conditions in the drought-parched lands of West Africa's Sahel region, to the vast flooding from Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast, to the powerful earthquake centered in mountainous Pakistan.

But the giving set the tsunami apart. Above the snow line in Pakistan, emergency workers are now trying to move tens of thousands of people living in tents to lower ground, but are hampered in part by a shortage of funds. In the tsunami-affected areas, money will never be a problem.

''There is enough money in the kitty for everyone to get homes," said Fadlullah Wilmot, director of projects in Indonesia for Muslim Aid, a British-based charity, as he sat cross-legged on the floor of a Banda Aceh house on stilts, which was built by his charity in partnership with Oxfam International. The two groups have built 120 houses in this area and plan to do a few hundred more.

''It's all a matter of who builds the homes, where, and when," Wilmot said. ''It will take maybe two or three years."

The pace of reconstruction varies significantly from country to country, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and even within neighborhoods, because of a tangle of problems over land ownership, disagreements over where to rebuild, and the loss of miles of shoreline swallowed by the Indian Ocean. The earthquake rattled the underground plates so hard that Indonesia's coastline sank between 18 inches and 6 feet.

Several reports have detailed shortcomings in the response. An Oxfam report six months ago found that aid tended to go to the richest people, including business owners and landowners, while the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said that ''too much money" from donors influenced charities to go their own way, creating vast coordination problems. ''Nearly everyone could hire a helicopter or boat, make their own needs assessments and distributions, and 'fly the flag,' " the report said.

But signs of improvement are emerging, propelling the rebuilding effort forward.

In Thailand, the resort hotels of Phuket, where tourists videotaped horrifying scenes last year of water smashing through buildings, are nearly completely renovated. In Sri Lanka, a few thousand fishermen who lost everything now have new boats and new nets. Here in Aceh Province in Indonesia, which suffered the most damage, officials estimate that 16,000 houses have been built in the past six months.

Furthermore, a peace agreement struck in August between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement, known by its Indonesian acronym GAM, not only ended 30 years of conflict, but has also allowed reconstruction to move along unimpeded by security concerns.

In Sri Lanka, home to an even deadlier conflict between the army and the Tamil Tigers separatist movement, a 2002 cease-fire still holds, if tenuously. The rebel movement wants more political power and has said it will resume the war if its demands are not met next year. Charities are already suspending their programs in Sri Lanka's northeast, where the conflict is centered, and violence has surged there in recent days.

By far the biggest recovery effort remains focused on the west coast of Indonesia's Aceh Province, where an estimated 500,000 people lost their homes. Today, the vast majority of survivors remain displaced, including 70,000 people in tents. Recently, the government set an April deadline to move the tent dwellers into barracks and temporary shelters, or to greatly improve their tents.

For the most part, an army of nongovernmental workers will be in charge of those upgrades. An estimated 5,000 foreign aid workers are now in Banda Aceh. Businesses catering to Western tastes are sprouting throughout the streets of the bustling provincial capital. It is even possible in this strict Muslim area to buy $10 bottles of Carlo Rossi wine from California in the back of one shop, where workers pack the alcohol inside cardboard boxes in order not to draw the attention of the religious police.

Among the most influential of the foreign workers is an engineer from the Hyde Park section of Boston who once worked as a state environmental officer on the Big Dig. David A. Murphy, 44, runs the engineering and construction projects of Catholic Relief Services, the Baltimore-based charity.

Murphy oversees millions of dollars of work on more than 60 miles of new road construction; 1,500 houses, dozens of water and sanitation systems, a hospital, a city park, the dredging of a port, and even the mapping of topography and new high-tide lines along 300 miles of the Aceh coast. No one knows where the high-tide lines are, critical information if houses are not to be built in flood zones.

''When I saw the images of total devastation last Christmastime, I felt pangs that I couldn't ignore," Murphy said during a ferry ride to Pulo Aceh island, seven miles north of Banda Aceh and the site of one of his projects. ''My wife, Linda, was moved to tears. We felt we should try to do something."

Murphy had done some work for Catholic Relief Services in the past and eventually signed a two-year contract to move to the northern tip of Indonesia, along with his wife, three of their four children, and his mother-in-law.

They are one of only a handful of foreign families to move here. Linda Murphy teaches her children at home. The family brightened their Christmas by finding an artificial tree in the Indonesian city of Medan, a 45-minute plane ride away.

On Pulo Aceh, an island of 6,462 people before the tsunami and 4,833 now, Murphy and two Indonesian engineers inspected progress in the rebuilding earlier this month.

''CRS was a little nervous about this project," Murphy said as his four-wheel-drive vehicle bounced along the newly constructed road. ''They had never done this type of project before. I told them: 'No problem. Just get out of my way.' "

He stopped the car at a bend in the road. ''There we go, baby!" he shouted, as he walked over to a pipe that was spilling mountain water into a lagoon. ''Love that fresh-water flow."

But his mood dropped soon afterward. A backhoe operator digging into the side of a hill was scraping out clay soil, which washes away easily, not good for road building. ''Wish I could call Boston Sand & Gravel," Murphy muttered, referring to the company based on North Washington Street in Boston. ''Wish I could call someone -- the Yellow Pages were even wiped out by the tsunami."

The rebuilding has created high demand for all building materials, including dirt, wood, and concrete blocks.

A United Nations recycling project in Banda Aceh has started collecting an estimated 400,000 cubic meters of debris that was dumped on private land, enough material to fill 12 soccer fields three stories high.

There recently, a chain of 27 people stood in rubber boots atop a mountain of muck, extracting pieces of wood and passing them one person to the next. Sometimes workers have found pieces of gold jewelry. Sometimes they have uncovered parts of bodies.

''We found a skeleton yesterday," said Ida Zatnun, 24, who lost her husband and only child in the tsunami and now works for $3.50 a day as a UN recycler. ''We are used to dead bodies, so I wasn't scared. But I felt sad again. It made me think about my husband."

Memorial ceremonies were being held yesterday in countries hit by the tsunami, and hundreds are scheduled for tomorrow.

The emotional trauma of the disaster lingers throughout the tsunami zone.

For artist Round Kelana, 70, who was one of a half-dozen painters now exhibiting their images of the tsunami in a Banda Aceh government office, the day of the deadly waves remains the topic of conversation in coffee shops.

''For adults, it seems as if it happened yesterday, even though it is a year now," said Kelana, whose long white hair stuck out of his black beret in a hundred directions. ''When people tell their stories, sometimes they make jokes, and laugh. I do, too."

Sitting underneath one of his paintings, in which two women are screaming as they struggle in chest-high water to save their children, Kelana remembers vividly floating in the rush of tsunami water ''when a house floated by me and I said, 'God, save me by putting me on that floating house, so that I can someday tell my children and grandchildren what I had witnessed,' " he said, his eyes twinkling. ''God saved me!"

Kelana said most children seem better adjusted than adults. ''I went to a camp of displaced people," he said. ''It seemed many children had forgotten the tsunami completely. Their memory is erased."

At a point where Banda Aceh juts into the Indian Ocean, an area called Ulee Lheue, a community of about 200 people live in tents, clinging to hope that a charity will build homes for them, even if the land is in a flood zone.

Many adults have grown cynical as they approach a second year without a house. One sign said, ''The men of the tents wish you a happy Eid," referring to the Muslim holiday.

But for one girl living in the ruins, the future seemed hopeful.

Dede Arista, 11, said the tsunami had carried her nearly 3 miles inland before she scrambled onto a roof. For three days, she heard nothing of her family's fate, but her father found her and said her mother and younger brother and sister had drowned.

Everything has changed now. Her father has since remarried. Last year, her fifth-grade class had 39 students; now, her sixth grade class has 17, the tsunami taking most of the missing.

But Dede seemed not to dwell on the sad facts. She recently placed second in her class in exams, and she holds onto a dream of becoming a doctor ''so I can tend to my father if he becomes ill."

She wanted to know more about the world around her, asking question after question, such as what it was like to ride an airplane ''when it cuts through the clouds."

But she said that if she traveled, she wouldn't know how to explain her life.

After some thought, she said she knew what she would say. ''I would tell that I am an Acehnese girl, that I was taken away by the tsunami wave, but that I survived," she said.

Survival, no matter how painful, is the unbreakable thread that connects everyone here. The survivors are creating the rest of their life stories.

For Mohammad Daoud Abdullah, the newlywed, he hopes that means creating new life itself.

''It's hard because I still remember my first wife and my children," he said in a quiet moment after his wedding. ''But I'm also thinking about how I create a new future. By getting married, I can have children again. I want to have children again."

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com.

Go to Boston.com/globe to hear an audio clip of reporter John Donnelly and to view a slide show on conditions in Indonesia's Aceh province, one year after the tsunami.