Supporter: Bob Seipel

Today was our last day with our Mercy Corps guides. Our group has developed an easy relationship with the Mercy Corps team members who have been showing us around the Aceh countryside for the past two days, explaining the nature of their work with the people of the province. All of this took a great deal of coordination and planning, and we are grateful for their time, patience and hospitality. It was difficult to say goodbye, and I suspect they will be difficult to forget as well.

But before we were handed off to our CARE guides at midday, we were able to take in three more projects Mercy Corps has funded in the province.

The first was the most hands-on of our visits here, and I mean that literally. In a village called Lam Ujong, we were taken to a small group of modest buildings that house a brick-making operation consisting of a kiln and two thatched-roof open-air structures where the bricks are made and dried. The factory employs four people, actually two couples, from the village. Brick factories like this one are fairly common in the area since the soil here contains mostly clay.

What made the brick operation we visited unusual is that it is owned by the community rather than a private individual, as is typically the case. Deciding as a group and on their own initiative, community members took the $1,200 cash grant provided by Mercy Corps to rebuild a brick factory destroyed by the tsunami as a means of ongoing income generation for village members.

The factory is being leased for two years to a man from the village. His rent is an eight percent cut of the 45,000 bricks a month he produces, which the community sells for about $120 to fund a variety of needs, including hiring a teacher for the children, scholarships and funding start-up businesses in the village. Since mid-June 2005, the village has raised more than $1,600.

The highlight of the visit came when a woman named Paini, hard at work making bricks, allowed me to try making a few of my own.

She showed me how to take a large lump of clay and throw it hard - she indicated I didn't do it hard enough at first - into a wooden form, after which a scraping tool is used to level it out. The form is raised, and the still-wet brick is carefully laid on a pile of other drying bricks.

It is difficult, gritty, repetitive work. Paini can produce an amazing 1,200-1,300 bricks a day. In the time I took to make two badly formed ones, she probably could have made at least 10. She assured us she would catch up. The factory owner presented me with a sample of a final product before we left, and I will treasure it always.

Our next stop was a visit with the village planning committee in Lam Asan Klieng, which is about 80 acres in size with a population of 370. Villages being rebuilt from scratch are required by the Indonesian government to have detailed 10-year plans that take into account location and design of housing, schools, community centers, infrastructure and sanitation. The plan also includes details about future expansion, given a projected growth rate of four to five percent a year.

Mercy Corps is one of the organizations facilitating the planning process in cooperation with the government, providing planning tools and professional consultants that meet with the villagers to develop a plan that makes the best use of the land and is environmentally sound. The entire village must agree to and sign the plan before any work can start - signatures of all shapes and sizes were scattered all over the plan we saw. Reaching consensus was an arduous process for the planning committee, we learned, but it ensures a sense of ownership and commitment that would not be realized otherwise.

Next we visited Miruk Lamreudeup, a village whose population was cut in half by the tsunami. There we saw an organic gardening project headed up by the village women, which just started up after seven weeks of planning and preparation. The small plot of land had been donated by one of the women; it is literally her backyard.

When we arrived, 20 women of a variety of ages were hard at work clearing the plot of overgrown tropical vegetation. Graciously, they stopped what they were doing to speak with us. Several we talked to had other jobs, working in a brick factory or one of the kiosks that sell food and other items. One woman was a midwife with 50 deliveries to her credit.

They said they were concerned about their children's health and the need to find a way to keep the community clean of garbage and other waste. Like most mothers anywhere, they want a better life for their children, and they are willing to do what it takes to make that happen.

We learned from our guides that the garden is meant to grow vegetables for the consumption of the women and their families, and eventually, if all goes well, for sale to the rest of the village to provide an additional source of income. Mercy Corps, along with another nongovernmental organization called Green Hands, is providing the necessary training, seeds, tools and fencing materials to the participants. It is a pilot project designed to promote long-term self-sufficiency for these communities and will be expanded to other villages if successful.

Although there is not an apparent lack of food here, we're told that poor nutrition is a problem in the province, with many children suffering from persistent anemia and other related ailments. Adding more vegetables to their diets will help.

As we said goodbye to our Mercy Corps guides, they underscored how the contributions from Boeing and its employees and retirees had given them the ability to innovate their approaches to addressing community needs and the flexibility to discover the best solutions in advance of implementation.

"The way we do our work even now was shaped and informed by what we learned in the beginning, which is leading to even greater positive impact than we would have expected otherwise," said Mark Ferdig, director of Aceh programs for the organization.

"When it comes down to it," he said, "it's really about trust - your employees' trust that the company will be good stewards of their contributions, your trust in us that we will use these contributions wisely, and the communities trust that we will help them be self-sufficient and successful.

"We take that trust very seriously."

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Today we went to the beach. Now, before you begin to roll your eyes, let me explain. This is not just any beach. It is certainly beautiful, with smooth white sand and water as blue as the sky.

But soon you notice some things missing. There are only a handful of palm trees, and the land above the sand, which you would expect to be green and lush on this equatorial island, is instead haggard and dull.

Then it hits you: a little more than two years ago, this beach witnessed more chaos and destruction than most people could ever imagine. That day, an earthquake caused the Indian Ocean, with monstrous 90-foot waves, to swallow everything in its path, spit it out and swallow it again.

Those waves ruined the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people. But for the past two years, the survivors of this disaster have been fighting to regain what they lost, mourning the loss of loved ones they could never regain, and generally getting on, thanks to sheer determination, incredible will and the strategic assistance of local and international nongovernmental organizations such as Mercy Corps.

We had the honor of meeting several of these courageous people today as we traveled around the Aceh countryside with our Mercy Corps guides.

For the thousands of farmers here who relied on the land to grow rice for a living, the journey back has been slow. The ocean soaked much of the landscape with salt water, making it unusable. But from the bright green acres of rice paddies we saw today, it's clear that progress is being made.

Through Mercy Corps' cash-for-work program in the months following the disaster, local villagers were paid a better-than-average daily wage to clear the fields of debris that included ruined houses and cars, dead cows and human remains.

After this first step came desalinating the land, a long process directed by Mercy Corps and paid for by donors such as Boeing and its employees and retirees. The organization is now making in-kind grants of raw materials the farmers need to start planting, including seeds, tools and barbed-wire fencing to keep out the marauding wild pigs that come down from the mountains every night.

This first crop since the tsunami hit, being harvested now, will serve as seed for next year's crop and as sustenance for the farmers and their families. When congratulated for what seems to our naive eyes to be a successful crop, the leader of the village said only, "We needed more rain to get a better yield." Apparently, nature is not cooperative when it comes to this island province. But the farmers' hope is undeterred.

There are so many stories to tell of the grit and determination of the people we are meeting. We ate lunch at a place called Joel's Restaurant that used to be on the beach I just told you about. Joel left the island after the disaster, settling in Italy for more than two years. But he's back; he says he missed his home and its people.

His restaurant, now located farther from the beach, is by all accounts very successful. He shares his success with his neighbors, contributing nearly half of his income to orphans of the disaster. A true philanthropist in the guise of a simple restaurant owner.

Then there are the villagers who have been plagued, not directly by the tsunami, but by the recently ended conflict between the Indonesian military and the "Free Aceh" separatists. Like the residing floodwaters and the ongoing restoration of the land, the successful peace process has eased tensions between these villagers, making them more willing to work together to improve the lives and livelihoods of all. We witnessed this in a small village where a key half-mile access road connecting homes to the rice paddies has been refurbished with gravel and new runoff ditches.

Mercy Corps provided the funding, but all the labor and much of the coordination came from the village. Mercy Corps also is helping the village complete a community center that villagers had partially built themselves before running out of funding - funding that they raised on their own.

We met a woman who has made small angel-food-like cakes for her village for the past 25 years and was able to expand her family-run business thanks to a $150 cash grant provided by Mercy Corps. Now she makes 100 bags of six cakes each every day, working from sunrise to sunset with her daughters and other female relatives at her side.

One of the most touching stories we heard today came from a man who is slight in frame but likely has the emotional and physical strength of two men twice his size. He lost three of his four children and his wife to the tsunami. His small tire business, which catered both to cars and to the island's ubiquitous motorcycles, was also destroyed. But thanks to just a $300 cash grant from Mercy Corps, his business is back up and running, serving an average of 25 customers a day and making a living to support his one remaining 13-year-old son.

The stories of these people are gratifying and energizing. They have lives to lead, and they lead them largely independently, but now more successfully thanks to the support of organizations that are fueled by donations from people like you and me and companies like ours.

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After many months of preparation and planning - and many days of traveling and what seemed like countless takeoffs and landings of a variety of Boeing-made aircraft - we finally arrived at our final destination of Banda Aceh late Sunday afternoon. I have eagerly anticipated this moment from back in July 2006, when I was chosen to take part in this site investigation representing my Boeing colleagues.

As we walk across the tarmac, the weather is surprisingly mild after the heat of Jakarta, our first stop in Indonesia. The sun seems brighter here, the air less heavy. It's a good start.

Flying into the Aceh airport from the larger city of Medan about 300 miles southeast, I was excited by what looked to be a field of green rice paddies, which indicated to me that the area was coming back, albeit slowly, from the destruction of more than two years before.

These feelings were tempered somewhat by the devastation we witnessed as we drove through the city this morning closer to the "ground zero" of the coastline. New homes and those in various stages of construction stand side by side with those hopelessly destroyed. Debris and rubble of all kinds still mar the shores. Abandoned and damaged boats sit on dry land, far from the water.

In fact, one of our first site visits was to a 3,500-ton barge housing an offshore power station that apparently rode the waves more than two miles inland and was dropped into the middle of a small neighborhood, crushing people, buildings and cars. The unmovable barge now provides much-needed electricity to the homes in the area.

While it stands as proof of the incredible power of nature, in many ways, this "electric boat," as they call it, is a symbol of the resiliency and determination of the Acehnese people - making what is essentially a burial ground into something useful and life-giving.

That's one thing you notice here right away - the warmth of the people, their optimism and their ready smiles. They seem truly happy to see you. Even after one of the greatest disasters of recorded history, not to mention more than 30 years of military conflict, the people here radiate hope - the most necessary tool of survival.

After a while, we made our way to the offices of Mercy Corps, our host for the first few days of our investigation. There we met a group of very impressive, high-energy people, equal parts American-born and native Indonesians, some of whom have been here for nearly the whole duration since the disaster.

After an extensive presentation from the office leadership and much interesting discussion, I'm pleased to report that the people making use of our $1.8 million contribution to Mercy Corps are intense, resourceful and experienced individuals. Everyone shares an unswerving dedication to restoring the livelihoods of those the disaster spared regardless of the potential dangers and their own discomfort.

I also was reassured to note that the more than 400 Mercy Corps staff members in Banda Aceh are good businesspeople as well. My evidence is the rigorous compliance, financial, accounting, and monitoring and evaluation systems and processes they put in place almost immediately upon their arrival on the scene.

"Our intent is to innovate on, maximize and leverage what we are doing every day," Sasha Muench, deputy director of the organization's Aceh program, explained to our group.

Later in the day, we had the opportunity to meet a few beneficiaries of Mercy Corps' Financial Access program, which guarantees loans to small-business owners to help them start or rebuild their businesses.

One such beneficiary is a woman named Ms. (or "Ibu," as they say here) Suwarsi, who started her tofu-making business in 1997, only to have it destroyed by the tsunami. She lost all of her production machinery and tools as well as her raw material.

She managed to reopen her business in June 2005, but found she needed help to be successful. Later that year, a loan facilitated by Mercy Corps (of what equated to just over $2,700) enabled her to ramp up production by 50 percent and employ six other people. Now she produces about 400 kilograms (roughly 900 pounds) of tofu a day, which she distributes locally and down the coast by ferry.

A member of our group asked Suwarsi if she felt like life was finally "back to normal" for her now, expecting to hear about how she felt after going through such an ordeal. She responded that she was still not happy with her company's output. Thinking that she may have misunderstood, our group member pressed the translator to ask the question again.

The answer was the same: "I would like to increase production by at least another 50 percent. I should be producing at least 800 kilograms by now."

When you think about it, a true businessperson could not possibly answer anything else.

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Bob Seipel, a program manager for Boeing Space & Intelligence Systems Mission Systems, recently reported from Banda Aceh, Indonesia the company's internal news, Boeing News Now.

He visted Indonesia in January as part of a delegation to investigate the progress of the rebuilding in Aceh province on the island of Sumatra, one of the areas hit hardest by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Boeing employees and retirees' donations accounted for nearly $2 million of the total Boeing contributions of $4.5 million split among three international relief agencies, including Mercy Corps. Mercy Corps was one of two organizations that sponsored Boeing's site investigation.

Seipel's responsibility on this trip was to be the eyes and ears of Boeing employees and retirees who gave so generously to this disaster - and to report back on how their dollars and those of the company are being spent in the relief efforts.

The following three stories show what he found in Banda Aceh.

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