This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land

From California, to the New York Island...

Right now, almost all of the villagers are living in temporary housing made out of wood scraps or still living in tents. As the villagers are looking to build permanent housing, a lot of land-related issues are coming up. A major roadblock to rebuilding of permanent homes has been the government's lack of direction regarding land reclamation and planning. Many of the NGOs are out in the villages trying to facilitate the rebuilding process like making village sketch maps. But the NGOs are afraid to go ahead with the actual building because the government planning agency may come out with policies on all these issues I'll mention below, and what if the policies counter what the NGOs are doing? Then, that's a total waste of labor and resources. So glad that my project doesn't directly deal with private land issues.

Definition of a Village
Under Indonesian law a village must constitute a certain number of villagers for it to be considered a village. If there are fewer people than the government set number, then the government will not bring in electricity, water, or give funding to build a school or a clinic. After the tsunami, many of the old villages no longer meet the government minimum requirement. There's talk that some villages that are situated in a cluster will combine into 1 village, or that they will negotiate amongst themselves to decide where a school or a clinic will be located in order to benefit multiple villages. But what if an ex-village doesn't want to move?

Planning within a Village
Some big questions that are being asked out there include:

If an entire family perished in the tsunami, what will happen to their land? If a child is the only survivor of a family, will he/she be able to reclaim the family land when the child turns 19? If the village lost most of its population, how will they rebuild? Will the surviving families rebuild on top of their old land and be isolated from other families? Will survivors re-plan the village and build their new homes next to each other? <- This is the preferred option by a lot of the NGOs & donors because it's facilitate community building but also be easier and cheaper to distribute water and electricity to a cluster of homes versus to many isolated house.

The Banda Aceh <-> Meulaboh Road
I think I've mentioned this road in a previous posting.

The US government is rebuilding the 245km road along the western coast of Sumatra. Much of the old road was washed away by the tsunami and the remnants of the road runs pretty darn close to the new coast line and is only 2 or 3 feet above sea level. With a big storm, the road is easily flooded over. But this road runs through the heart of many coastal villages. The US Army Corps of Engineers came out last week to survey. The word on the street is that they are planning to move the main drag to the otherside of the coastal mountain range - about 5km inland from coast. This will be a big problem as in the budget has only enough money to build the main road but not to build access roads to the coast where these villages are located.