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Aceh aided by the little
guys
By Gary LaMoshi
DENPASAR, Bali - Six months after tsunamis
ravaged Indian Ocean coasts from Africa to
Indonesia, governments and individuals have
stepped up with more than US$10 billion in aid
pledges and ideas on a similarly grand scale.
Strategies for Aceh province include converting
the capital known as "Mecca's front porch" into a
cyber Banda Aceh and an 11-volume master plan
providing vision on issues from spatial planning
to resilience.
Unfortunately, the
11-volume master plan is among the most concrete
achievements to date of the Indonesian
government's reconstruction efforts. There's good
cause for caution and careful coordination in
dispensing billions of dollars for projects whose
impact will last for decades. The scale of the
devastation also offers planners the closest thing
to a clean slate to implement comprehensive
solutions they're likely to encounter in their
careers.
Getting normal
Meanwhile, as the bureaucratic gears of
governments and international agencies grind,
hundreds of thousands of survivors yearn to pick
up the pieces and move forward now. "Time and time
again our field staff have seen that the community
in Aceh just want to return some sense of normalcy
to their lives and rebuild their livelihoods as
quickly as possible," Alex Ryan, Aceh projects
coordinator for Indonesian private aid group IDEP,
reports. High-level planning and coordination,
necessary and desirable as it may be, doesn't
address many needs on the ground. In Aceh and
elsewhere that job has fallen to dozens of
agencies such as IDEP.
They've adopted the
name NGOs - non-governmental organizations - from
bureaucratic-speak, but these small local groups
remain unencumbered by excess organizational
baggage, able to nimbly meet pressing needs with a
minimum of red tape. Bali-based IDEP - the Bahasa
Indonesia acronym for Indonesian Education for
Permaculture - was among the first on the scene in
Aceh and is still on the job, with missions
evolving to meet changing needs on the ground.
"IDEP does not have a complex bureaucracy
which can tie up resources and time and hence can
make decisions quickly, while still ensuring that
donor funds are being used responsibly and
effectively," Ryan explains. "Small NGOs tend to
have smaller administrative cost overheads than
large agencies and NGOs. We spend less on things
like wages and accommodation as we stay in
community areas and don't hire expensive
international consultants, meaning a greater
proportion of donor funds reach the areas of
need."
IDEP shares offices in the Bali
hill town of Ubud with the Sumatran Orangutan
Society (SOS), and both groups boast a mix of
Indonesian and expatriate supporters with local
and international links (including
English-language websites). For example, SOS has
volunteers in Medan in Northern Sumatra, the
province bordering Aceh, and extensive contacts
with NGOs throughout that region. So when the
tsunami hit, the two NGOs were uniquely placed to
respond.
Sending out an SOS
Within hours of news of the disaster on December
26, IDEP and SOS began coordinating through
contacts in Sumatra and raising funds in Bali and
internationally. Their first truck convoy loaded
with supplies purchased in Medan left for Banda
Aceh on December 29. Two days later, IDEP
volunteers were in Padang on the west coast of
Sumatra - where there were more deaths than in
Banda Aceh - organizing aid deliveries using boats
from scuba and surfing tour operators. "Local NGOs
like IDEP are able to use their networks and their
field teams to assess the real needs of the
community while taking into account cultural,
religious and social factors that some of the
larger agencies miss," Ryan points out, noting
that IDEP and its Sumatran partners distributed
aid to communities that others had neglected.
Local savvy and contacts enabled IDEP to
learn that a plane carrying aid from Australia had
been unable to land at Banda Aceh's overstretched
airport on January 3. IDEP's coordinator in Padang
arranged for the plane to land there, rather than
return loaded to Jakarta, adding 15 tons of
desperately needed supplies to the west coast boat
lift. Expertise and contacts from this first wave
of relief helped IDEP provide aid to victims of
the subsequent aftershocks, including one that
devastated the island of Nias in late March.
In addition to relief supplies, the
missions carried items such as pumps for clearing
wells flooded with seawater so neighbors could
remain together and out of refugee camps. "IDEP
has tried to support communities to stay out of
IDP [internally displaced persons] camps and
dependency on food hand-outs by providing them
with what they need to be independent and quickly
recover," Ryan says. "Our first boat mission to
Calang [a West Sumatra town where 28,000 of 35,000
residents initially were missing in the tsunami's
aftermath] in the immediate post-disaster period
took with it tools and materials for rebuilding
houses or new shelter, buckets filled with basic
items for families to live and water sanitation
and treatment equipment." An estimated 450,000
survivors of the tsunami remain homeless today in
Aceh.
Ecoteknik techniques
The
relief phase has ended but Aceh's recovery, and
IDEP's role in it, have barely begun. Building on
local relationships formed in the relief phase,
IDEP is coordinating redevelopment of Samatiga
north of Meulaboh, one of the hardest hit areas.
IDEP is also establishing Ecoteknik, a live-in
model village, to train more than 1,000 trainers
in sustainable redevelopment technologies, from
construction to enterprise development. "IDEP is
trying to move away from a culture of aid
dependency that many large agencies fall into
towards one which gives communities autonomy,
pride and sense of achievement and long-term
sustainability well after the project life," Ryan
says. Both projects are scheduled to last into
2007.
In these projects and others, IDEP
and other small NGOs have also helped bridge the
trust gap between international agencies and local
communities. "IDEP has been approached by quite a
few international organizations looking for a
trustworthy partner to channel their funds through
into worthy and transparent projects in Aceh,"
Ryan says. "This is an illustration of the wider
suspicion that the international community has
over the ability of the Indonesian government to
be able to effectively manage Aceh disaster and
recovery funds. At the end of the day, donors want
reliable organizations to deliver their
hard-collected funds to the people most in need,
and IDEP showed in the early weeks after the
tsunami that it has been able to do just that."
Governments and international giants could
learn a thing or two from these small fries that
punch way above their weight when it comes to
delivering help where it matters most.
Gary LaMoshi has worked as a
broadcast producer and print writer and editor in
the US and Asia. Longtime editor of investor
rights advocate eRaider.com, he is also a
contributor to Slate and Salon.com.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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