| DATE | Tues 26th Feb / Fri 2nd Mar 2007 |
| PRESENT | Luke |
| PURPOSE | First Meeting with Dave Hodgkin |
| ACCOMMODATION | Dave’s house in Tembi Village RT06, RW04 Tembi, Sewon, Bantul, Jogyakarta |
Through contacts from Project Galle in Sri Lanka, a link to Dave Hodgkin had been established. Dave was living south of Jogykarta, Java’s second biggest city to Jakarta and working for Oxfam as a shelter coordinator. He now works for the UN heading the shelter coordination team and (with his background in environmental architecture) is also the technical advisor. He is Australian, coming from Canberra and has been working for NGO’s for 10 years primarily around Asia. He is fluent in Javanese and accounts Jogykarta as home.
In May 2006, Jogyakarta was making headlines on CNN as reporters announced the evacuation of villages in the footholds of Gunung Merapi, a classic child’s drawing of a volcano which was active, spitting out lava and threatening to erupt. International and local NGO’s were on the ground in this area coordinating the repositioning of hundreds of people. On the morning of Sunday, May 27 th 2006 Dave was making his way home after a night of filming Merapi when he encountered local inhabitants fleeing northwards from their villages, screaming “tsunami”. Having been stationed in Maloba, Aceh 10 days after the Boxing Day tsunami working as a shelter coordinator Dave knew that at almost 20 kilometres inland from the coast, the threat of a tsunami was unlikely. What he witnessed as he continued to drive south was a widespread devastation of housing – endless buildings were merely reduced to piles of rubble and the realization that a substantial earthquake (5.8 on the Richter scale) had hit this province was wholly evident. Familiar with emergency response procedure he quickly made vital contacts and secured tarpaulins flown in from India and Dubai for the village of Tembi where he resides – by the end of the first day the 240 families had one each; vital temporary cover from the sun and the expectant rainy season.
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By the end of the first 3 months – 75,000 tarpaulins and 26,000 transitional household kits had been distrubuted.
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By the end of the first 9 months – 385,000 tarpaulins had been distributed and 66,000 transitional temporary houses had been built.
- Tembi is one of 16 hamlets within the village. There were in the region of 8-10,000 hamlets affected.
- 240,000 houses were completely destroyed or classified ‘heavily damaged’.
- 85,000 houses sustained ‘medium damage’ and are uninhabitable.
- 0ver 300,000 people were directly affected.
- The death toll was 6000. This figure is low because the earthquake occurred on a Sunday morning at 6.30am whilst many of the Muslim inhabitants were praying at the mosques and consequently out of their houses. Being made rather more substantially from concrete many of the mosques withstood the tremours
There are some fundamental differences between the two natural disasters: The scale, the number of countries affected, the death toll, the media coverage, the after affects of tourism and sustaining local livelihoods. However, the key factor that has become apparent from conversations with Dave, local inhabitants from Tembi and from riding around the sub districts is this; the earthquake was and is a ‘Shelter Disaster’. Roads, small bridges and pathways primarily remained intact and useable, food supplies, crops and agricultural land was unaffected and communication networks and power supplies received very little damage. In comparison, the tsunami obliterated everything in its course rendering local communities immediately helpless in all aspects of civilized living. Dave described Banda Aceh as being “Hiroshima’d”.
In Indonesia they have calculated that the earthquake caused 3 times the level of homelessness compared with the tsunami. However, there is one intriguing similarity between the two disasters – the total amount of donated money divided by the total number of fatalities is approximately the same.
Dave’s quote: “Donations match the dead, they do not match the living”
Evidence of the destruction caused by the earthquake is still very apparent in Tembi, although as villages go, it has made great progress in its redevelopment. According to local sources only 4 dwellings remained untouched. The current status of rebuild is at varying levels within the village – this has been dependant on a number of factors.
- The wealth and existing living arrangement of the family
- The amount of damage sustained
- The build quality of their houses
- The age of the locals affected regarding their ability to work themselves
- The help from government and NGO’s
Tembi is certainly fortunate to have Dave living in the village. He has been monitoring the progress first hand and using the village as a case study for his role in advising the government and other supporting agencies on how to proceed throughout the disaster area.
The village has also benefited from a very wealthy Australian who employs 90% of the villagers to build furniture for him. He is very well connected and secured excellent funding from HSBC who adopted a policy to build 130 houses. Many of the houses are 60% complete – walls have built on existing undamaged floors and bamboo-roofing frameworks are in place with tiles waiting to be fitted. The problem is that many of the inhabitants have had this work done for them courtesy of the Australian – his workers have now moved on and many of the houses remain unfinished whilst residents live in sheltered temporary accommodation next door.
Some areas of the village have been cleaned up, but in others masonry, brickwork and roofing lie untouched since the day it fell. Some wealthy residents have simply left, scared of the repercussions should it happen again and these houses are not only dangerous in their current state, they also need to be taken down. But who should carry out this work or even authorize it? Other areas around houses have remained untouched because they are rented accommodation and the landlords do not want their tenants orchestrating the clean up as it is not their material!!
His English was good and he was able to translate to locals my role and what I was doing – as you can imagine they were extremely hospitable and appreciative of my being there. Again, it was humbling!!
Fortunately, no one died in Tembi although there were casualties of broken bones from falling masonry. Ibnu himself helped pull people out of the wreckage – he had picked up a woman with broken legs and carried her free of the building over piles of debris to put her down. Realising she could not walk herself he tried to carry her again but he simply couldn’t lift her. Adrenalin had come to his aid the first time. Such stories relayed by the locals were always expressed with a smile and ‘c’est la vie’ attitude. In these parts of the world although often the need is dire it is rarely shown with any desperation.
My tour continued with Ibnu later in the afternoon and local people practiced the limited English they knew on me. Many families had small adorable children who were initially shy and then over the top brazen when I had moved on. By dusk I was offered coffee at Ibnu’s house. They are currently living in their parents building at present and are waiting for secondary help to rebuild their own dwelling. I met Tatang and we talked about his NGO role within Jogykarta working for the Indonesian branch of Friends of the Earth (Kappala Indonesia) and Walhi – www.walhi.or.id (external link). Thanks to Ibnu my tour could not have been better - it had been a very rewarding day.
Heading south to the small town of Imogiri gave me the chance to see how other areas had been affected and how progress was being made. Even on this main road the rates of rebuild varied considerably from houses being completed to families still living in tents or temporary accommodation. Through his work with Oxfam Dave had produced a detailed document that mapped each sub district and coloured coded the number of houses damaged in each village. His analysis of the redevelopment concluded that villages on or near the roads had fared far better than those off the beaten track.
It became clear from my ride that the scale of this earthquake was big, primarily because of the density of the population and the sheer number of houses affected. En route there was a lot of evidence of rebuilding – some of this being carried out by house owners and some by organized building groups. There was also some evidence from advertising boards of help from overseas organizations.
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- THE NEXT STEP |
The timing of the trip was actually very good for in the next month Dave will cease working with the UN to take a break back to Australia since he has been working flat out since the tsunami. Through his work and from living in Jogyakarta he has a very clear picture of where the region is at regarding the regeneration and rebuilding of houses. Despite there being an array of big organisations present and operating in the areas with big sums of money there are still many families that either slip through the net or are unaccounted for and this is where the Piers Simon Appeal can be most useful.
Not all buildings destroyed were residential – many small business were badly affected by structural or complete damage to their buildings and Dave is already thinking of personally trying to help a team of carpenters with the funding to rebuild the barns where they operate from. Again, the Piers Simon Appeal can be active in this area as well.
Dave is happy to act as our project manager and he already has some projects in mind that together we can help with. This will also include our money being utilized by some of the local NGO’s working in the area, like Tatang’s group and so from a small scale purist point of view our money will really be supporting not only the local inhabitants but also the wider community. (He has already been active in fundraising himself and has received some money from family and friends in Australia. By his own admission though he found the process a little messy as money was being banked into his personal account by friends and he found it hard keeping track of what was fund money and what was his own). In the short time I spent with Dave I gained a true picture that he would be an excellent ambassador working on our behalf. He was clearly very passionate, professional and experienced in his line of work and extremely caring towards the people and the area in which he lives. Above all, he knows the area as well as any local, is fluent in the local language, is very well connected within his field and upon his return from Australia, will have a freer timetable to work with. The situation from a Piers Simon Appeal point of you reads very well!
Before I left for Thailand I met Dave one last time to sum up and put in motion the next step. He will set up a bank account in Jogykarta shortly and let us have the details. He will also document through photos and short reports where and by who the money is being spent. We agreed on a figure of 10,000 pounds to be the first installment with the condition that should our allegiance be successful we can send more money. There is plenty scope for us to be supporting the earthquake for some time and this should be the thrust of any further fundraising we carry out. I have many photographs and video footage of the situation in and around Tembi and plan to make a short documentary film that we can use to promote this.