What happens in a disaster zone after the news crews go home?

Plan UK took Jerome Taylor of The Independent to see western Sumatra, Indonesia first hand. The region was hit by a devastating earthquake in September.

The full article appeared in the Independent on the 23rd January 2010.

Deep inside the jungles of western Sumatra, 27-year-old Sofiyan is looking for the remains of what was once his village. The village of Cumanak used to stand in a fertile flat valley of rice paddies surrounded by durian and coconut trees, but all that remains of the settlement now is an undulating carpet of brown mud littered with broken tree trunks.

Four months ago, Cumanak was one of three remote settlements buried by an enormous landslide, triggered an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale. It was the fifth major quake to strike Indonesia in as many years, half of those killed hailed from Cumanak and its two neighbouring villages.

For two weeks, televisions crews, aid agencies and rescue personnel flocked to the valley. Bodies were pulled from the rubble and survivors were taken to displacement camps on the plains below. But for those who lived through the Sumatran earthquake, the real battle for survival has only just begun.

Sofiyan knows his village will have to be abandoned. What he really needs, he explains, is for the roads further up the valley to be cleared of landslides. "For those who lived, we have the harvest to think about. Further up the mountain I have lots of crops. But at the moment I cannot get to them. Without the money from those crops, how will I rebuild my family's home?"

Next big assignment

At the time of writing, the world's disaster response teams – many of whom would have travelled to Sumatra in October – were frantically packing their bags for their next big assignment, a 7.0 quake that devastated the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The news is again dominated by Armageddon-esque images of an already desperately poor people struggling to survive in their shattered buildings. Later it will focus on remarkable tales of survival, people trapped under tonnes of concrete surviving off little more than condensation and sheer will power. And then the cameras and the emergency response teams will leave.

It will be the aid agencies and the people of Haiti itself who will ultimately have to pick up the pieces and begin a long, tortuous road, back to recovery. For those who survived Indonesia's latest significant quake, particularly those in the more remote areas, the rebuilding of homes after such a widespread natural disaster becomes an often painstaking process and one that rarely leaves them better protected from natural disasters than they were before.

Permanent accomodation now top priority

For the aid agencies that have a presence in the area, the rebuilding of permanent accommodation is now top priority. Djuneidi Saripurnawan spent the past five years co-ordinating relief work on behalf of Plan International in Aceh, the province in northern Sumatra that was devastated by the 2004 tsunami. He was just about to close the office when the Padang earthquake struck. His team quickly travelled south and began what is now a well-rehearsed immediate disaster response, distributing food and water, sending mobile health clinics into the more remote regions, rebuilding wells and constructing temporary classrooms to keep children in school. But in many ways, that was the easy part.

"The biggest problem we are facing at the moment is a lack of shelter," Saripurnawan says. "It is nearly four months after the quake and many people are still living under tarpaulins. Those who have rebuilt temporary accommodation have been using old material from their collapsed houses. What we need to start building is new homes that can resist quakes."

Many seismologists believe the enormous faultline running along the coast of western Sumatra is due another major earthquake similar in scale to the 9.1 quake that triggered the Asian tsunami in 2004. Kerry Sieh, a scientist at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, estimates that such a shift will occur worryingly soon. "To those living in harm's way, it should be useful to know that the next great earthquake and tsunami are likely to occur within the next few decades, well within the lifetimes of children and young adults living there now," he wrote in a recent paper.

But for many of those made homeless by the latest Indonesian quake, finding enough money to build even a semi-permanent dwelling will take years unless they receive outside assistance. Come the next big quake they will undoubtedly be back to square one unless they invest in properly constructed homes.

Read the full article.