JAKARTA, Indonesia — Years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami devastated the Indonesian province of Aceh, Arsalan, a tall, stout man with a face locked in an expression of sadness, still carried a tattered picture of his young daughter Rini in his shirt pocket.
For months after the disaster the father of two had added his daughter’s pictures to the tapestry of missing person ads printed in newspapers and pasted on the walls of shelters.
In 2008 Arsalan had renewed his search for Rini based on the picture he was convinced had been taken in a refugee camp after the disaster. The photograph gave him hope, but also reopened wounds.
The emotional impact wrought by disaster lingers long after a town’s reconstruction, and as Japan assesses the damage from the recent 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, aid workers and sociologists say Aceh may offer important lessons about psychological recovery.
Like Aceh, entire towns along Japan’s coast have been flattened, families ripped apart and people left with nothing but uncertainty. There are also vast differences – foremost in the death toll, 20,000 dead or missing in Japan versus 170,000 in Aceh.
“It was important to motivate people to return to their regular activities because they help them restructure their minds.”~Rika Setiawati, who ran a psychosocial program after the Aceh tsunami
Before the tsunami nearly one-third of the people in Aceh lived in poverty. The remote province’s population was young. Kesennuma, a northern Japanese seaport wiped out by the wave, is aging.
Media reports from Aceh told of despair and rotting bodies. Images from Japan highlight an orderly, systematic response to the disaster. Washington Post reporter Chico Harlan described neat lines of shoes and recycling bins sitting outside shelters.
“The notion of gaman, to endure or tolerate, is a core value for the Japanese,” reported the Christian Science Monitor.
But while culture is an obvious difference between a Japanese victim and an Indonesian one, responding to a disaster with order and kindness may be more a factor of disaster preparedness, say aid workers who facilitated the relief effort in Aceh.
After the 2004 tsunami, the international community pledged $7.8 billion to help with reconstruction and development, according to the World Bank. An additional $2.3 billion came from the Indonesian government for a five-year rehabilitation program.
The outpouring built roads, schools and more than 100,000 homes, stirring an economic boom that saw missing person notices replaced by deals for new cars and building materials. By 2008, most aid agencies had packed up and left, taking the jobs they brought and sparking fears of an economic vacuum.
Still, recovering from the trauma of such a wide-scale disaster involves more than how much damage was done and the amount of aid received, said Daniel Aldrich, a professor at Purdue University specializing in post-disaster recovery.
“The most important factor is social networks. The stronger the connections you have inside a community and the more connections a community has to external funders, organizations and institutions, then the better, the faster, the more efficient and the more effective the recovery will be.”
In Aceh, a 30-year armed conflict prior to the tsunami added to the difficulty of building community bonds, and emotional trauma heightened tensions. Japan has also struggled to preserve lines of communication among victims with a reputation for stoicism.
Eliminating the communication methods people use to talk through their recovery, led to scores of lonely deaths, or kodokushi, said Aldrich, referring to the damage done to the social fabric in Kobe, Japan, after a massive earthquake in 1995.
“A number of elderly victims were rushed out of their damaged homes into open apartments,” he explained. “But [when] you cut them off from friends, family and the neighborhoods they’ve known for years, all the things they know to be normal, all the things they rely on for emotional support and psychological assistance are gone.”
Post-traumatic stress and depression are common after major disasters, particularly among those who saw the destruction happen or never found missing family members, Elizabeth Frankenberg, a sociologist at Duke University, wrote by email.
A study she led titled “Mental Health in Sumatra after the Tsunami,” determined that restoring aspects of daily life was an important component of recovery. Many psychosocial trauma programs in Aceh worked to do just that by organizing religious activities, sewing groups and working quickly to get children back to school.
“It was important to motivate people to return to their regular activities because they help them restructure their minds from the emotional turbulence,” said Rika Setiawati, the coordinator of a two-year psychosocial program run through the Ibu Foundation, a nonprofit that assists women and children in emergency situations.
Setiawati worked with more than 500 people over six months to address symptoms ranging from emotional disturbance, such as persistent anger and depression, to sleep disorders, reduced appetites and compulsive behaviour.
“You would see people praying all the time for comfort, but a lot of it was guilt and the thought that they were being punished for doing something wrong,” she said.
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