Contributor: Ralph King

I had just returned from a family ski trip to Lake Tahoe over New Year’s when I got a call from a friend at Mercy Corps. “This is going to sound totally crazy...” he said. The agency was looking for a volunteer to handle the deluge of media interest on the ground in Banda Aceh, Indonesia following the historic tsunami.

In theory, I fit the bill: I had lived in Indonesia before and spent my career in journalism. But in the 25 years since my volunteer English teaching post there, I hadn’t spoken the language. As a reporter, I had never covered a disaster. And I didn’t know the first thing about relief work. Still, Mercy Corps needed help fast.

It was quite a jump cut. One day, I’m knee-deep in powder enjoying my family and friends. Six days later, I’m in the tropics of Banda Aceh amid thousands of people who have, in a matter of minutes, lost their family and friends, forever.

Mercy Corps’ base of operations in Banda Aceh was a little house, a cottage really. It had one big common room, a tiny bathroom with a cold splash bath, a crude kitchen. Chickens ran around in the muddy yard. It was here that some 30 people lived during the first weeks of the response.

In the bare common room, they worked 18-hour days, pausing only for a bowl of rice or a brief night’s rest on dusty rugs. Here they faced an ever-expanding list of duties with an ever-changing cast against a backdrop of unprecedented tragedy. But for all that, the little house was surprisingly calm. It was a bubble, an oasis.

There were makeshift outposts like this all over town. More than 50 non-governmental organizations like Mercy Corps were on the scene. Foreign military crews set up their compounds out by the airport. The center ring of the circus was United Nations (UN) headquarters, a cluster of white tents pitched on some tennis courts. Relief workers ran around full of adrenaline staking claims to the mission at hand and swapping rumors of the impending eviction of foreigners, of rebel skirmishes on the outskirts of town, of disease outbreaks in the camps.

In the midst of all this madness, what happened inside that little Mercy Corps cottage amazed me. The team, 30 youthful Indonesians and expatriates armed with nothing but a few laptops, pulled off extraordinary feats day after day. It’s hard to imagine a bigger logistical nightmare than distributing food in a third-world disaster zone. Trucks break down, supplies are looted, bribes are demanded, you name it. Yet within two weeks, that tiny team had found a way to feed close to 50,000 people. That fact really hit me. It proved how big a difference a band of deeply committed people can make in situations like this.

The team camaraderie was remarkable, too. I felt it most strongly during our nightly talks sitting cross-legged in a circle on the big rug. Diane Johnson, our team leader, would begin with a few words that always seemed to settle us down. The 38-year-old earth mother from Louisiana had cut her teeth in places like the Niger, Afghanistan and Kosovo. She’d break news from outside the bubble, debunk rumors and offer pithy advice. She’d dole out kudos to deserving colleagues and we’d applaud. Then we’d go around the circle describing the day's events and plotting out the next one.

Once, a big tremor disrupted the meeting. We all jumped up, ran into the yard and kept talking. Another night, the meeting was delayed because a food distribution team missed curfew. When they finally showed up, we cheered. Whenever too much tension crept into the room, someone would crack wise and have us rolling on that rug.

The circle talks kept us going but the really crucial conversations were the routine ones team members had with Acehnese survivors. One of Mercy Corps’ main thrusts in a disaster is to shift quickly from emergency relief to recovery and long-term development. Yet each situation is different - a great solution in Sudan may not work elsewhere - so it’s important to find out what aid recipients want and follow that. In Banda Aceh, food distribution was Mercy Corps’ foot in the door. After making deliveries to the refugee camps, team members would canvass from tent-to-tent.

The consensus from this outreach fed late-night brainstorming sessions that led to funding of programs within a day or two. Banda Aceh was one big test tube, a situation no one had ever seen before, and everything had to be improvised on the fly. The result was overnight successes like the Cash-for-Work program, which hit the front-page of The New York Times and many major TV networks. Such results would have been impossible without people on the ground who were able to think and act on their own and who respected the views of people they were trying to help.

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When thousands of Acehenese children troop back to school this week (January 26) after their traditional month-long break, they will find something missing: mud. The tsunami that devastated Northern Sumatra on December 26 did not destroy most of this city’s schools but it did leave many of them ankle-deep in black slime, almost guaranteeing they would not re-open on schedule.

But in early January, Mercy Corps, in partnership with several local non-governmental agencies, launched a breakneck clean-up campaign aimed at 10 schools and employing more than 400 people. The workers, equipped with rubber boots, shovels and wheel barrows provided by Mercy Corps, removed countless truckloads of mud, cleared debris, and cleaned furniture. They also found seven corpses, which were carried away for burial, says Sogi Maskat, who supervises Mercy Corps’ school cleaning effort here.

Despite the lack of heavy equipment and daily torrential rains, the crews have already restored eight of the schools to their previous condition. The workers, some of whom lost their homes and means of livelihood to the tsunami, earn 35,000 rupiahs per day (or about $3.90, a standard wage here) under a cash-for-work program also used by Mercy Corps to clear miles of neighborhood access roads in the region.

For Lukman Ali, headmaster at one of the city’s best high schools known as SMU III, the program has been a glimmer of hope amid a disaster that killed at least 20% of the school’s 1,500 students and 96 teachers. “Kids have been coming in every day to ask when school would be starting again,” Mr. Ali says, standing at the school entryway during another downpour. Some 50 students showed up several days in a row to volunteer their help. “They are just itching to get back,” he adds.

Educators are heartened by this, noting that the familiarity of the school routine will offer critical stability and emotional relief to local children. “Schools are going to play a big part in the healing,” says Cynthia Tindongan, a psycho-social expert who is coordinating Mercy Corps’ response in this area.

At many schools, the tsunami also ruined textbooks and other teaching materials. So Mercy Corps is helping its target schools obtain replacement materials offered locally by UNICEF. In addition, it hopes to provide back-to-school kits—pencils, paper and other supplies—for returning students.

While Mercy Corps provided funding and management of the school clean-up, the impetus for the effort came from local authorities, says Diane Johnson, the organization’s director of Sumatra relief operations. “It’s the government that’s pushing to get the schools open, which is great,” she says.

Crew members say they are glad to have jobs that will help their city recover but it is hard, dirty, and occasionally dangerous work. One day, for example, while cleaning the school’s library, some workers uncovered a 15-foot python coiled under a desk. Incredibly, four men managed to drag the snake, which was as fat as a fireplace log, out into the street and wrestle it into a bamboo cage without injury.

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Eumperum, Aceh Besar, Indonesia –Two days ago, this village that stands among lush rice paddies outside Banda Aceh was a virtual ghost town. Residents who fled the onslaught of the tsunami could not return to search for relatives or salvage possessions because mounds of debris, mud and brush blocked their way.

Mercy Corps staff rounded up 95 local citizens and put them to work with picks and shovels. After a day’s work, they had cleared the roads and earned enough to feed their families for a while, as part of Mercy Corps' innovative “cash-for-work” program.

The following day, the crew returned to find a half dozen trucks and cars on the scene and residents already starting to sift the wreckage. The crew then turned to its next job: digging mass graves for bodies that were being pulled from destroyed homes.

Sasha Muench, Mercy Corps’ senior economic development specialist in Jakarta, said the agency plans to scale up the program to other villages in the area in coming days. “We start small and figure it out. Then we can use donor money to ramp it up,” she says.

The program offers tsunami victims a meaningful activity, involves them directly in the reconstruction effort and pumps cash into the local economy. “Cash-for-work has the potential of being a triple win,” Muench says.

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