Teurebeh (Indonesia): The traditional fisherman of Palau Aceh bore the brunt of the great tsunami that battered the western coast of Indonesia's North Sumatra two years ago.

A speck of an island just off the coast of Aceh province, Palau Aceh saw 25-metre waves that obliterated entire villages and swept away hundreds of people Dec 26, 2004. Two years later, the village is slowly rebuilding, but minus many of the fishermen who were its cultural identity and soul.

Traumatised by the disaster and with their beachfront villages gone, more than 100 families agreed to be relocated onto the mainland and start afresh. Today, they are resettled in Teurebeh village, which lies on a vast open plain with arid farmland and surrounded by pristine mountains  and 60 km from the ocean.

Teurebeh's 600 people are now full-time farmers, with the local government holding agricultural classes to teach them how to plant crops including corn, peanuts and various fruits. The village has dozens of modest but quaint concrete houses, neatly laid out in rows that look similar to a US suburban neighbourhood in the 1950s. Most residents have backyard gardens.

Many of the village men augment their farming by taking up readily available construction jobs nearby  building homes for other tsunami victims. At night, they return home to Teurebeh, which has a mosque, community centre and fairly soon, a new school.

"It works because everything's been integrated into the community," said Paul Dillon, spokesperson for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), who oversaw the village's construction.

Indeed, Teurebeh is certainly one of the many success stories in the reconstruction of Aceh province, which lost 177,000 people and hundreds of villages, towns and nearly half the capital Banda Aceh during the tsunami.
 

But there is no shortage of failures, either. Aid workers and government officials acknowledge that Aceh has been 'a mixed bag' of results.

While construction teams in Teurebeh will soon build 150 more housing units for more arrivals from Palau Aceh, tens of thousands of other Acehnese remain in temporary barracks with degraded security and sanitation. Permanent houses built by at least two foreign aid groups in other parts of Aceh had to be demolished and rebuilt because of shoddy construction.

Land and compensation disputes between local residents and the government rage daily, as do claims by rural villages that they are not part of the economic boom in larger towns and the provincial capital, where international aid groups are based.

 Two months ago, a mob seized the headquarters of Aceh's reconstruction agency, demanding more tangible results and less corruption involving reconstruction funds.
 

"We are constantly overwhelmed by the massive task confronting us," Kuntoro Mangunsubroto, the agency's director, told foreign donors in New York.

But given the scale of the disaster, it would be unfair and inaccurate to say post-tsunami reconstruction has been inept. Women in particular have been empowered in tsunami-hit areas by creating cooperatives, with the help of foreign donors, in which members can submit small business plan proposals and receive start up loans. So far, in 15 cooperatives involving more than 2,000 women, the default rate on loans is only one percent.

Post-tsunami reconstruction has also been given a huge boost by a peace agreement between the Indonesian government and Free Aceh Movement, a separatist guerrilla army that fought for independence for 29 years.

Peace and security have enabled reconstruction to proceed at a much faster pace - unlike in Sri Lanka, another tsunami-hit nation still at war - and in turn, the multi-billion-dollar rebuilding effort has helped push the peace process forward.

"There's certainly cause for optimism," said Mark Knight, who manages the IOM's pro-conflict and reintegration programme in Aceh. But he warned that the province's rehabilitation must be a 'long-term social, political, economic and psychological process'.

Most of the scars remaining today from the disaster are mental - traumatised survivors with gut-wrenching stories about the deaths of spouses, children, friends - their entire lives as they knew them.
 

Mardiana, a tsunami widow, demanded to be relocated inland after her house near the ocean in Banda Aceh's Lemtemen Timur district was flattened by waves. She now lives in a house in Teurebeh with her 18-month-old grandson, but her four adult children continue to live in what is left of their old neighbourhood.
 

"I can only go back to visit for a short time," a weeping Mardiana said.

Her tears are eventually replaced with a smile when she talks about the new string bean patch in her front yard, and how she hopes her daughter, who is training in Banda Aceh to become a schoolteacher, will come to work at the village's new school.

 "I'm happy living here  we have a new home," Mardiana said.