Official rehab agencies in Nias to observe quake anniversary
Mar 27, 2006 21:33
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - The Indonesian government through the Aceh and Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Body (BRR) along with the United Nations Agency for Aceh and Nias Recovery UNORC will commemorate the first anniversary of the killer earthquake that jolted Nias district in North Sumatra province on March 28 last year.
"North Sumatra Governor Rudolf Pardede will lead the commemoration which will be held in Gunung Sitoli on Tuesday," BRR NAD-Nias`s communication and stakeholders relations head Mirza Keumala said here Monday.
BRR chairman Kuntoro Mangkusubroto and Nias district head Binahati Baeha; donor agencies and non-governmental organizations from Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the United States, and the Netherlands; international agencies like the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank, Multi Donor Fund, the European Commission, the International Organization of Migration (IOM), and the United Nations` International Children Fund (Unicef) as well as local administration officials and media will join the commemoration.
Visiting a cemetery of earthquake victims in Vodo area and a revitalized hospital in Gunungsitoli, capital of Nias district, as well as the handing of new houses to quake survivors will highlight the commemoration.
Mirza said the commemoration will be closed with an observance of a brief silence at 11.09 p.m. the time when an earthquake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale rocked Nias and killed 140 people.
The observance of a brief silence will be followed by Nias traditional performance.
The Nias earthquake which rendered thousands of peole homeless occurred three months after a giant earthquake and a subsequent tsunami hit Aceh province on December 26, 2004.
Tsunami affected the western and southern coast of Nias but the earthquake on March 28, 2005 damaged most parts of Nias district. (*)
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Kalimantan timber shipped to Nias
The Jakarta Post: April 06, 2006
NIAS, North Sumatra:
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has starting to supply timber to help speed up reconstruction work on Nias island, which was devastated by a massive earthquake in March last year.
The first shipment of 2,000 cubic meters of timber recently arrived in Nias, carried by a World Food Programme ship. Overall, the UNHCR will supply 15 cubic meters of timber to the North Sumatra island.
"The timber was shipped from Kalimantan and the purchase was handled by the Medan office," said the head of UNHCR's Nias office, Reiko Hasegawa.
The timber will be used to build houses and other infrastructure. "The timber will be distributed for free to NGOs working in Nias to help the rebuilding process," said Rick Haughton, of the UNHCR.
He said the timber, which will be distributed to NGOs based on the quantity they requested, was legal and certified.
Slow reconstruction on the island was blamed partly on problems in obtaining legal timber as most of the timber readily available was allegedly derived from illegal logging. -- JP
Indonesian museum battles to save quake island's heritage
GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia : A private museum on the quake-ravaged Indonesian island of Nias is fighting a lonely battle to help preserve the unique cultural and heritage of the inhabitants here.
The seven-year-old beachfront museum plays host to a collection of more than 6,000 artefacts from the mainly Christian island, where many people still practise ancient animistic traditions.
Delicately-carved stone and wooden ancestral statues are on display along with earthenware utensils, sizeable architectural models of the different styles of traditional Nias' homes, ancient weapons, and impressive steel armory.
The museum, which emerged largely unscathed from a massive earthquake last March that killed more than 850 residents, was the brainchild of German-born Catholic priest Father Johannes Haemmerle.
He began to build his own collection in 1972, painstakingly adding individual items from across the impoverished island, which is about the size of Bali. The collection formed the centrepiece of the museum, which today lures researchers from around the world.
Haemmerle, a fluent speaker of the local language of Nias, has also compiled texts of Nias' legends and songs and published books on the island's culture.
"It has been, and continues to be, a difficult effort to preserve Nias' heritage," the 65-year-old priest told AFP, adding that the museum's work has been met with suspicion from many local officials.
Others however consider the museum to be a leading authority on Nias' culture.
"What he and his museum has done is extraordinary -- a lot of what is in his museum can longer be found on Nias," Nias district spokesman S. Yan Zebua said of Haemmerle.
Christian missionaries arrived on the island less than a century ago and convinced many eager residents to abandon links to their old beliefs, although in the south animistic traditions still very much permeate the lives of people.
And while links to the outside world have eroded some local customs, Nias' remote location -- about 100 kilometres (62 miles) off Sumatra island -- means it has been largely sidestepped by development elsewhere in Indonesia.
Huge stone monuments still dot the island along with about 1,000 of Nias' traditional, steep-roofed wooden homes constructed from massive logs, all testament to a culture that largely evolved in isolation from the modern world.
"This isolation has been beneficial to the rich culture of the island ... but it has also resulted in Nias being practically forgotten by the central or the provincial government," said Nata'alui Duha, deputy director of the museum.
None of the seven museum staff have formal education in archeology or architecture. "But we have been able to learn from the field and from the people and now even academics will come to us to get data or learn about Nias' traditional architecture," he told AFP.
The museum however has been snubbed by the agency overseeing the massive reconstruction required here after last year's 8.7-magnitude quake and the Indian Ocean tsunami three months before, which killed 140 people on the island.
The head of the agency's taskforce on culture in Nias, Ahmad Husin Ritonga, admitted that the museum was a "great contribution to the preservation of Nias' heritage" but said the museum had a different standpoint to his office. He declined to elaborate.
The museum is also directly involved in helping to preserve the living history of Nias, such as maintaining the traditional homes -- known as oma hada -- as well as megalithic sites. Funding comes only from private donations and ticket sales.
Operational costs are about 20 million rupiah (about 2,000 dollars) per month. "We are continuously facing a shortage of funds ... It is really sapping most of our energy," Haemmerle said.
Ticket sales on this island of 710,000 people clock in at around 5 million rupiah per month, with many visitors families coming to take advantage of the facilities at the museum -- including a small zoo and restaurant -- rather than to see the artefacts.
Nevertheless, Haemmerle is optimistic about the museum's fate. "We are talking about a legacy for Nias, for Indonesia. It has to continue to exist," he said. - AFP /dt
Labels: 2006
Survivors remember the dead in Nias on anniversary of quake
National News - March 29, 2006
Nani Afrida, The Jakarta Post, Nias
Survivors prayed at mass graves for lost family members Tuesday on the first anniversary of the devastating quake that killed 850 people on Nias Island, North Sumatra.
Hendrawan, who was trapped for five days under the ruins of his home, said he still felt the pain of bereavement. He lost his wife and two children in the massive 8.7-magnitude quake that struck late at night when many people were asleep.
"I'm grateful that I survived, but now I'm on my own," he told The Jakarta Post before bursting into tears in Fodo, Gunung Sitoli.
The 41-year-old joined thousands of others who said quiet prayers in memory of their loved ones, while mass prayers were held in other areas of the predominantly Christian island.
There also were solemn remembrances at Merdeka field in Gunung Sitoli, with the main commemoration to be held at 11 p.m., the time of the quake.
As the observances were held, reminders of the struggle to rebuild were all around, with children studying inside makeshift tents erected outside their damaged school buildings.
"Many times I feel sorry for my students because it's hard to concentrate on your studies when rain and wind are coming in," Aliran Masniar Zebua, 28, a teacher in Afia village, told Reuters.
A year on, some 13,000 survivors still live in tents while only 1,448 houses have been built for displaced people.
Officials blame slow reconstruction on logistical difficulties and lack of infrastructure connecting damaged parts of the island, famed for its ancient culture and ideal surfing conditions and home to about 710,000 people.
"Nias was not particularly well-serviced by roads and good quality bridges and good quality ports even before the earthquake, so you can imagine now what the situation (is)," International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman Paul Dillon told Reuters.
The IOM, along with the Aceh and Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (BRR), has been one of the main players in building houses in the past year.
"In one sense, there has been a lot of progress but there is a heck of a lot more to be done," Dillon added.
BRR's chief Kuntoro Mangkusubroto urged all Nias residents to support reconstruction work.
"Let's all of us build Nias, make it more developed than it used to be, especially since there is support from the international community," said Kuntoro, who presented more than 1,200 new houses to survivors Tuesday.
For some lucky individuals, the anniversary finally brought them a new roof over their heads.
"Praise the Lord, I am very blessed to have this house," Yaaro Saromatia, a 35-year-old civil servant, told Reuters outside his newly built brick home in Dahara village.
Hendrawan is still living in a home provided by the local church. "I don't receive assistance from the government," he said.
Jakarta Post - Survivors remember the dead in Nias on anniversary of quake.mhtLabels: 2006
Nias marks one year since deadly quake
AFP - Yahoo
Tuesday March 28, 03:13 PM
GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia (AFP) - Indonesia held emotional ceremonies to mark one year since a deadly earthquake struck Nias island, as survivors remembered lost loved ones and looked ahead to the still-huge task of rebuilding.
Survivors, officials and aid workers lay flowers and lit candles at a Christian cemetery as they prayed for the more than 850 people killed by the 8.7-magnitude quake, which injured 6,000 and left tens of thousands homeless.
The quake, the second biggest worldwide since 1964, hit three months after the Indian Ocean tsunami lashed the island's shores and killed 140 people there, but was far more devastating for Nias. Some 13,000 homes were flattened.
The head of the agency overseeing rebuilding in tsunami-hit Aceh and Nias, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, led the prayer ceremony and laid wreaths at the cemetery in Gunung Sitoli, the island's main town.
One of the survivors, 40-year-old housewife Mimi, said she had come to the cemetery to remember her mother.
"I'm very sad because I didn't have a chance to make her happy. Why did she leave us so soon?" she said, weeping as she lit a candle at her mother's grave.
Many of those buried at this cemetery were ethnic Chinese, a large minority group on Nias, which is a mainly Christian island in the world's most populous Muslim nation.
The tragedy in Nias, an island off the west coast of Sumatra, was largely overshadowed by the aftermath of the tsunami.
The walls of water on December 26, 2004 -- triggered by the biggest quake in forty years -- claimed 168,000 lives in Aceh in northern Sumatra and sparked an unprecedented global humanitarian response.
Three months after that, disaster struck Nias, with devastation strewn indiscriminately across the island where access was near impossible.
Mangkusubroto's office has said that besides the totally destroyed homes, about 58,000 suffered damage. The island's infrastructure was also badly hit, with some 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) of its road network made impassable.
Physical reconstruction was only launched last December, according to the agency.
The agency handed over 1,200 ready-to-use homes to survivors on Tuesday but before that only some 200 had been rebuilt.
"Let us pray to the Almighty and remember those whose lives were lost in the earthquake last year," Mangkusubroto told survivors at a ceremony to hand over the houses.
"Going forward there are great challenges facing us. Therefore everyone should stand up to build back Nias better."
US officials dedicated two new schools and two bridges on the island to mark the day, the embassy said.
The cost of rebuilding Nias stands at one billion dollars, half of which is needed to rebuild transport infrastructure alone.
Only 235 million dollars however has been pledged by the government and international donors, Mangkusubroto's agency said in a statement Tuesday.
At another ceremony attended by thousands of schoolchildren, Nias district chief Binahati Baeha said survivors should look to the future.
"Today Nias remembers what happened one year ago. Many of our friends and relatives died. But we must not dwell on sadness. It is time for us to rebuild Nias," he said.
A moment of silence was also due to be held at 11:09 pm (1609 GMT) on the island to mark the moment the quake struck.
AFP - Indonesia's Nias marks one year since deadly quake - Yahoo! News UK.mhtLabels: 2006
