Tsunami: three years on - Before and after

Tearfund's Kelsey Hoppe shows us what a difference three years can make.

In March 2005 when I first walked through the debris left by the tsunami it was hard not to notice all of the personal affects. There was the broken tennis racquet half buried in mud, the little green bottle, the child’s marble, the needlework, and the blue clothes hanger caught in tangled steel with a yellow dress still hanging on it. All the things that made up thousands of peoples’ lives now strewn over hundreds of miles of coastline.

In the quiet fishing village of Meulaboh, where Tearfund’s Disaster Management Team has been working for three years, 35,000 were people killed – nearly half of the entire population. Almost all of the rest were living in barracks and camps set up through the humanitarian relief effort.

Three years later it is hard to find outward evidence of the tsunami’s devastation. The tall sea grass and dense green jungle hide the mass graves and foundations of the buildings that were destroyed. Houses, schools and shops, built by NGOs and the government of Indonesia line the roads. The barracks and camps are being dismantled as people move back into permanent homes.

The open camp is a hive of activity. Fishing boats dot the coast. However, the human toll of this tragedy is less evident and will take longer than three years to heal and the work completed is just the beginning on these communities long road to recovery.

Compare and contrast - a few images of Muelaboh immediately after the tsunami - and now. Click on the arrows below to view the images.

While the re-construction work completed by Tearfund provides obvious results the human impact of Tearfund's relief effort cannot always be captured in pictures. Farida [pictured far right], a teacher attending a Community Health Education (CHE) Teacher Training is so grateful that she begins to cry and hugs the CHE Project Manager as she speaks. She has been teaching first graders for fifteen years but confesses that she has always felt stressed because she didn't feel that she had the knowledge or ability to teach them.

"We really feel a change by this work. I now don't feel this pressure to do teaching because we have so many ideas how to make the children enthusiastic and it's so different from last year" she says.

While the teacher training focused on equipping teachers to deliver health messages the teachers talk about how their newly acquired skills are empowering them to teach better. Farida adds, "Now that we are familiar with the methods we use them for other lessons - even in maths - and we can observe an improvement of teaching in all subjects."

The Disaster Risk Reduction curriculum introduced by the CHE team was so appreciated that the Ministry of Education asked Tearfund's team to train teacher's from all 167 elementary schools in the province. The children have fun learning what to do in the event of an earthquake, as well as being taught community health messages.

• Read more on other tsunami development projects
• Find out more on Tearfund’s progress in all the tsunami-affected regions here
• To give to Tearfund’s disasters fund click here