Background Summary

Deski is an Indonesian national, although he now lives and works in Australia.  He spent the first ten years of his working life employed in Jakarta, first as a youth leader, and then later as a newspaper office manager and junior editor.  All this radically changed however, following the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami, which devastated coastal areas through parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Indian and Thailand.  Deski spent four months coordinating the activities of a large number of Indonesian volunteers who arrived in Banda Aceh wanting to assist in the emergency response and early recovery stages following the tsunami.  From mid-2005 he then established a national not-for-profit organisation operating out of Banda Aceh and later, also from other locations throughout both Sumatra and Java.  In recent years, Deski married an Australian health professional he had met during the early recovery stage of the 2004 tsunami.  He now lives and works with wife and child in Melbourne, although he travels extensively back and forth to Indonesia.  

Question 1

Following the Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing day 2004, you were, within a few days, on the scene at Banda Aceh coordinating the activities of a large number of Indonesian volunteers.  You stayed working in this capacity from Jan-April 2005.  What were your initial reactions to this immense disaster, and how did the affected urban population of the city, together with the large number of national and international aid workers you came into contact with, cope and deal with this devastation?

I guess to see the site about one week after the tsunami in Aceh was really shocking. You could see dead bodies and rubble everywhere. The people who were injured and displaced also created a sense of great sadness and grief.  So throughout this period I was involved in both helping the survivors cope physically and mentally, but I had to also help retrieve dead bodies, as well as cleaning schools and some houses. In all parts of town we could see people who needed food, health assistance etc.  During that period, people came to help from all over Indonesia, as well as from around the world.  I think this was because the disaster was one of the largest in recorded history, and it so badly impacted the province.  A mixture of aid workers, health professionals, the military, and even ordinary people, came together to deal with this devastation. For the first time I saw the military from different nations coming together for the same purpose, that of helping people, rather than for that of making war.

Question 2

Following the May 2008 Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar/Burma, you were later contracted to do some recovery related work for a NGO partner agency in Yangon/Rangoon.  What were the particular challenges for stakeholders responding to the Myanmar/Burma situation, as compared to the situation in Indonesia/Sri Lanka/India/Thailand, when the Dec 2004 tsunami struck these latter countries?   

What frustrated me the most was that the Burmese government didn’t make either the emergency response, or the early recovery initiatives, easy to do. They held up assistance from many countries, because they worried more about the political impact of this, rather than the humanitarian situation itself.  One of the examples of this was the problem of getting funds into the country.  Some agencies had to resort to smuggling money across the border, as the official rate of exchange was kept so artificially low.  Another problem was just getting out of the capital city in order to visit the affected delta areas.  Each time we wanted to travel, we had to seek out a permission letter from the government; but sometimes this took days to access!!  All of these factors combined, made the overall situation much more difficult to work in, as compared to the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.