Tsunami: Six Months On

From John Aglionby at The Observer.

Before the Boxing Day tsunami I’d never met anyone who had suffered so much that they had effectively lost their identity. In regular trips to the devastated regions in the last six months I’ve met thousands of such ‘ghosts’; once proud people reduced to bedraggled, grieving bodies dressed in donated clothes and kept alive by the world’s largesse.

It is only when one considers what it takes to rebuild someone’s identity that one gets a sense of the size of the reconstruction task in Aceh and North Sumatra, the Indonesian provinces that bore the brunt of the 26 December earthquake and tsunami.