This woman lost 11 family members when giant waves swept over her village in Muara Batu, Aceh Utaraq, Indonesia.
Photo: YEU/ACT International |
QUICK RESPONSE.
LONG-TERM PRESENCE.
A COMMITMENT TO THE FUTURE.
Story: Chris Herlinger/CWS
These are the watchwords for Church World Service as it responds to the aftermath of the December earthquake and tsunamis that killed more than 200,000 people.
One key to CWS's response, particularly in Indonesia, where CWS has a long-standing presence: local capacity to respond quickly to a disaster of almost unimaginable magnitude.
"CWS Indonesia's large regional staff and local partners were well positioned to begin delivering aid almost from day one," said CWS Emergency Response Director Rick Augsburger, who visited Indonesia shortly after the Dec. 26 disaster.
With a staff of more than 100 and with its long-time connections to secular and interfaith partners, CWS has worked in Indonesia since 1964.
Local capacity was also a key element as CWS responded in other affected countries, including Sri Lanka and India. The CWS Pakistan regional office sent rapid response teams to Sri Lanka to assess needs and launch emergency relief there, working in tandem with the National Christian Council of Sri Lanka, a CWS partner, in distributing shelter and other material assistance and to assess further emergency needs.
Concurrently, CWS's long-time partner in India, Church's Auxiliary for Social Action, responded immediately to needs there with CWS support.
But response in the United States is also part of the story, as church and community groups across the U.S. collected and assembled CWS Health, School, and Kids Kits to be shipped to the battered regions.
The immediate relief efforts in Indonesia - which included the delivery of more than $3.5 million in emergency supplies and medicines to the affected region - centered on aid to disaster survivors in Banda Aceh, the worst-hit area of Indonesia.
But shortly into the disaster, CWS initiated long-term recovery programs, focusing on assistance to 50,000 displaced persons in Banda Aceh, with a special emphasis on children, female-headed households, widows, the elderly, unemployed families with limited means, and people or families who have not yet received aid.
Part of that work, Augsburger said, was to provide trauma counseling for three months as crisis intervention and then for nine months as post-crisis intervention.
"The mind can barely grasp what these people have been through and what they will need to begin to recover," he said. That is especially the case with children, who are among the most vulnerable and traumatized.
Trauma is likely to be aggravated by current living conditions: A CWS Indonesia Emergency Assessment team recently concluded that disaster survivors in Indonesia are likely "to be living in camps longer than expected" because of the scope of the disaster, said Augsburger.
"Clearly the scope of the destruction and number of fatalities, and the traumatic impact this devastating disaster has had on the surviving communities were of a scale I had not seen before," he said. "The physical destruction was indescribable." (See interview)
A fisherman in the port city of Galle, Sri Lanka,
inspects his ravaged nets. The tsunami destroyed the fishing and
tourist industry - 80 percent of the area's economy.
Photo: Paul Jeffrey/CWS-ACT |
But if the destruction of homes, businesses, roads and other infrastructure was indescribable, the sheer difficulty of the response did not daunt the CWS staff in Indonesia, who, along with its local partners, deployed medical teams on a rotating basis and have distributed food and non-food packages to survivors.
Dr. Julia Suryantan, a senior CWS health and nutrition program officer in Indonesia, described the scene this way:
"We did assessments immediately as we arrived," she said, and the team found there was an immediate need to help those who were staying with relatives or host families but were not in camps for the displaced.
How to do that? Establish a mobile clinic that would go from community to community, from need to need. The reaction was favorable, Dr. Suryantan said. "We were really accepted by the people. They knew that we are not Acehnese, and that we are not Muslim, but they still welcomed us."
It is not easy work, though, as people are suffering both physical and mental ailments, including anxiety, sleeping disorders, and hypertension: "Every day, our staff teams, especially the psychosocial workers have listened to the unbelievably sad stories of those affected by the disaster and, of course, it has made the medical and psychosocial teams feel very exhausted, not only physically but mentally," Dr. Suryantan said.
Similar reactions were common among Church World Service Pakistan/Afghanistan staff who provided supplies and assessed continuing needs in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, in early January as they met with tsunami survivors in a camp for the displaced.
CWS shelter kits were distributed in a number of locales, including a Pentecostal church camp that accommodated survivors from the affected community of Kalakoda. There were 1,263 people in the camp - 435 families in all.
One of the survivors was Chadrakala, a young woman in her 20s who lost her young, year-and-a-half-old child in the tsunami. "I am scared of [the] sea and I don't want to go back," she said. "My husband also wants to stay away from the sea. We need a respectable livelihood and a shelter to start our life again."
Those words point to the need for long-term recovery efforts - the cornerstone of the work of Church World Service and its partners.
CWS Indonesia plans a major reconstruction and rehabilitation project; similar projects are also expected in Sri Lanka and India.
As CWS staff in Sri Lanka worked long hours, meeting with survivors and religious leaders, an encouraging element came through - a degree of "interfaith harmony" between different religious groups: Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists. This in a country that has experienced its share of sectarian violence in the last two decades.
The CWS staff heard stories of Buddhists and Christian leaders traveling across country to provide relief materials for Muslims. Also heard were stories of followers of all four religions saying last rites for their loved ones together.
Rev. Jayasiri Peiris, general secretary of the National Christian Council of Sri Lanka - who thanked CWS for supplying disaster survivors with shelter kits and tents - said that these and other examples gave him and other religious leaders a renewed sense of hope amid tragedy.
"Our religious and political leadership should be wise enough to identify this silver lining in the cloud. We need donations and donors' care and the money to rebuild the country. But more than that, we need that trust between various factions of the society, and that will help the country to regain its strength."
Regaining strength. Other watchwords for the CWS response.
"The work that spells real disaster recovery is just beginning," says CWS Executive Director Rev. John L. McCullough. Your help is urgently needed to help us meet the challenge of long-term recovery. Make your generous contribution today online, or by calling 1-800-297-1516. Additional CWS CWS School Kits are also needed. Find out more at by calling 1-888-297-2767.