Today, five years after one of the worst natural disasters of modern times, Lampuuk, on Aceh's west coast, has been transformed. Instead of mountains of rubble there are hundreds of new houses. Children race their bicycles around the newly paved streets. The everyday buzz of community life has replaced the wailing of the bereaved. The area has been rebuilt from the ground up, in a remarkable effort has been replicated around Aceh, where up to 170,000 people died and more than 600,000 were left homeless by the 2004 tsunami. Survivors have rebuilt their lives in an extraordinary testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Yet the wounds remain raw; while normality has been restored, grief hovers not so very far below the surface.
The area has been rebuilt from the ground up, in a remarkable effort has been replicated around Aceh, where up to 170,000 people died and more than 600,000 were left homeless by the 2004 tsunami. Survivors have rebuilt their lives in an extraordinary testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Yet the wounds remain raw; while normality has been restored, grief hovers not so very far below the surface.
It was a disproportionate number of women and children who died. Maybe the women were with the children, and died trying to save them, or because they had to run at the pace of the slowest. Or maybe in a situation that terrible, where the margin of survival was so thin, a little more muscle mass went a long way.
