The Tsunami Recovery

Generally when I ask around people give the tsunami recovery effort about 5,6 or 7 out of ten. A pass lets say. A great deal of money has been spent here and now the tsunami area has houses, small ones typically, good roads, free electricity and in most areas a non-potable water supply. Some of the houses were no good and had to be reconstructed. Also generally there are a lot of empty houses because people had two or three built for them or for relatives who were actually dead. I don't feel I can blame them for this but it would have been better to build one good house rather than two bad small ones! Some people have built onto the small houses that they were given to expand them.

Some people did very well out of the tsunami. Typically wealthy people in the areas of Banda Aceh not affected directly did well. They rented out their huge houses to the NGOs at exorbitant prices. The NGOs paid because they were competing with one another. To give an example, probably a really big house (say 8 rooms) here would have rented for around $500 to a year before the tsunami. At the height of it some large NGOs were paying as much as $30,000 a year! People who had cars they could lease to the NGOs did very well too. So basically if you had money before the tsunami you were in a good position to make money afterwards. Definitely some people in the affected areas resent this, and understandably.

Another thing I think happened was that NGOs, again understandably, went for lump sum contracts. They paid the NGO price for that. But then the Contractor hired staff at Indonesian prices. The difference stayed with the Contractor of course!

Another phenomenon that happened was that a great deal of outside labour came in. People from other parts of the country seemed prepared to work for a few dollars a day less than the locals. Whether this should be seen as them being lazy or not is hard to say. The locals say that the cost of living is hirer in Banda Aceh because a lot of things need to be imported.

I guess the summary of it is that rebuilding after a disaster like that was complex and hard to do perfectly.