Saturday, 5August06
Highlights: IFRC office, USINDO school, drive around Banda Aceh: tsunami damage, ships on houses, electric ship, harbor, improved tent villages, coffee
This morning we met the mom of a friend of mine (Hiep) from Washington DC who works as the financial officer in the Red Cross office here in Banda Aceh: Barbara Riester. Barbara was great. We dropped by her office, hoping to see a little of what the IFRC (International Federation of the Red Cross) is doing here in Aceh and hear how things have been going since the tsunami. We got her undivided attention for 3 hours, met just about everyone in the office and went to lunch with them at Pizza House afterward! Ha ha.
It was like getting a crash course in disaster relief operations,,, filled with interesting tid bits you never knew about Red Cross work. For example, of all the people working in this IFRC office, Barbara was the only one who had prior Red Cross experience; everyone else was a cross-over from multiple backgrounds… USAID, various NGOs, civil engineers, business management, etc.
The conversation flowed from Hurricane Katrina experiences to 9/11 aftermath experiences, to tsunami & earthquake response… amazing stuff. A lot of these guys work seasonally… a few weeks here- a few months there, moving from project to project, country to country in some cases. It’s impressive.
Here, the IFRC combines the efforts of 40+ chapters of the Red Cross/Red Crescent (there are 183 around the world, and each country is only allowed to have 1) to implement a series of recovery projects ranging from infrastructure development (building wells, roads, piping for running water…) & city planning (where homes should be re-built, schools, hospitals,,, managing drainage, etc…) to actual building projects (homes, hospitals, etc…) and educational projects (teaching about hygiene, waste disposal, drainage, etc).
The IFRC has helped build “temporary” houses, which in many cases are more structurally sound than the homes they’re replacing. It’s a cookie-cutter box frame made of metal (lighter, stronger), with wood paneling. The wood part is interesting- because, despite all the illegal logging going on here, wood is more expensive than brick, in general. You don’t see wood houses in Yogya, for example.
An interesting road block is holding up much of the work,,, documentation of property rights. I have heard that between 5-10% of homes/property here have a written title or deed; meaning the other 90% is claimed by family heritage, verbal contract, squatters rights, etc… so figuring out who should get what benefits is holding up the works quite a bit. And that’s before they settle out who was renting, and who owned the land they were on. Oh boy.
This problem stretches everything out, because it’s hard to start building before you know who owns what, and who has rights to which land. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of survivors are living in semi-permanent tent villages… which are wood now, and resemble some Marine barracks I’ve seen- scattered randomly through the countryside.
Highlights: IFRC office, USINDO school, drive around Banda Aceh: tsunami damage, ships on houses, electric ship, harbor, improved tent villages, coffee
This morning we met the mom of a friend of mine (Hiep) from Washington DC who works as the financial officer in the Red Cross office here in Banda Aceh: Barbara Riester. Barbara was great. We dropped by her office, hoping to see a little of what the IFRC (International Federation of the Red Cross) is doing here in Aceh and hear how things have been going since the tsunami. We got her undivided attention for 3 hours, met just about everyone in the office and went to lunch with them at Pizza House afterward! Ha ha.
It was like getting a crash course in disaster relief operations,,, filled with interesting tid bits you never knew about Red Cross work. For example, of all the people working in this IFRC office, Barbara was the only one who had prior Red Cross experience; everyone else was a cross-over from multiple backgrounds… USAID, various NGOs, civil engineers, business management, etc.
The conversation flowed from Hurricane Katrina experiences to 9/11 aftermath experiences, to tsunami & earthquake response… amazing stuff. A lot of these guys work seasonally… a few weeks here- a few months there, moving from project to project, country to country in some cases. It’s impressive.
Here, the IFRC combines the efforts of 40+ chapters of the Red Cross/Red Crescent (there are 183 around the world, and each country is only allowed to have 1) to implement a series of recovery projects ranging from infrastructure development (building wells, roads, piping for running water…) & city planning (where homes should be re-built, schools, hospitals,,, managing drainage, etc…) to actual building projects (homes, hospitals, etc…) and educational projects (teaching about hygiene, waste disposal, drainage, etc).
The IFRC has helped build “temporary” houses, which in many cases are more structurally sound than the homes they’re replacing. It’s a cookie-cutter box frame made of metal (lighter, stronger), with wood paneling. The wood part is interesting- because, despite all the illegal logging going on here, wood is more expensive than brick, in general. You don’t see wood houses in Yogya, for example.
An interesting road block is holding up much of the work,,, documentation of property rights. I have heard that between 5-10% of homes/property here have a written title or deed; meaning the other 90% is claimed by family heritage, verbal contract, squatters rights, etc… so figuring out who should get what benefits is holding up the works quite a bit. And that’s before they settle out who was renting, and who owned the land they were on. Oh boy.
This problem stretches everything out, because it’s hard to start building before you know who owns what, and who has rights to which land. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of survivors are living in semi-permanent tent villages… which are wood now, and resemble some Marine barracks I’ve seen- scattered randomly through the countryside.
posted by jonathan adventures at 9:22 AM
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