Memories Live On
I remember my
friends and I were having post-Christmas brunch at our Chinese restaurant on
December 26, 2004 when one of our friends who worked for The Guardian got a
very urgent call. As he was leaving he just said a natural disaster struck
Aceh. We didn’t pay much attention to the news as Aceh at the time was still a
closed region under heavy-handed control of the military due to conflict
between Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM) and Indonesian Government. Only a couple of
days later I learned about the devastating disaster in Aceh. My eyes were glued
to the TV, flipping from channel to channel trying to find out more about the
damage and fatalities and found that not much information were available.
Then I started to
see communities (e.g. students, NGOs, religious groups) collecting donations
for Aceh. They even went to the streets and stood by the traffic lights. I
remember cried silently watching the news and told God in my prayers that I’d
like to help. Mind you, I have never worked on a post natural disaster of any
kind except my own silly personal disasters.
Well, God knows
me too well that I am a bawler – I don’t think I would survive working there
during emergency phase. So opportunity related to tsunami came to me to work
from Jakarta. A good friend who was Country Director of Project Concern
International (PCI) Indonesia at the time, hired me to help coordinate between
his colleagues delivering emergency relief assistance and PCI’s head office in
San Diego. I concluded my work with PCI as soon as they established their
office in Banda Aceh. I am still in touch with those I worked with during that
period.
Only after the
emergency phase was done – after Banda Aceh was cleaned up – then another offer
came to me to work in Aceh for four years as a consultant seconded to an ad hoc
government agency called BRR Aceh-Nias. So I went to Aceh through a
USAID-funded project managed by Chemonics Inc. called A-TARP. Thanks to USAID
for granting the Head of BRR’s request to fund me beyond their A-TARP life
time, I ended up working through the end of BRR’s end of mandate. On April 16, 2009 President Yudhoyono
dismissed BRR at the Palace in front of the ambassadors of donor countries and
heads of development agencies as well as select heads of local and
international NGOs.
What did I take
from that experience? Here are some of the invaluable lessons I learned:
- Leadership is
key to success, especially in managing billions of dollars of reconstruction
funding. Kuntoro Mangkusubroto was one inspiring leader back then and still is
until now.
- Kuntoro once
told me to trust people until they prove us wrong. That way you can start
building a new team. It was proven that many came to the challenge and excelled
in what they did at BRR.
- No one was an
expert when a disaster like 2004 tsunami struck. In fact, no one is an expert
when a disaster strikes in another area other than the place where you worked
before.
- Coordination is
an excellent buzzword but surely expensive and most of the time inefficient and
ineffective. Besides, many organizations are defensively reluctant to be coordinated
by the host government.
- Bilateral
development agencies are run by bureaucrats. So, manage your expectations as
things may not go as quickly as you believe it should have been.
- Multilateral
develop agencies are too big to move faster and they are as bureaucratic as
normal government agencies.
- NGOs manage
projects that are funded by bilateral or multilateral agencies who are run by
bureaucrats and inflexible bureaucracy. So, go figure.
- Some NGOs will come
with staff/workers/volunteers with little or no-experience. So, things may get
messier. Be prepared.
- Some people
will come ready to blame the host government for things that don’t work,
forgetting that they work in a post-disaster area where things will not work
normally. Most of them have never worked with their own government who may be
as bureaucratic (or incompetent) as the host government if not even more so.
- Some people who
come to a post-disaster area from a conflict region or another post-disaster
work, would think it’s like playing Lego where they can come in with a project
blueprint – that may be considered or may not be proven successful – from
another country to be implemented where they go. Then they get upset when their
proposal didn’t get buy in from the host government. Funny how they seem to
forget that the other country is not this country. Iraq is not Indonesia.
Pakistan is not Aceh. Even if you have worked in Jogja for a long time, it’s
still not Aceh. Just like Utah is not the same as New York, Papua is not Papua
New Guinea, and India is surely not Bangladesh.
- Politics are
everywhere. It’s between the UN agencies, donor agencies, NGOs, multilateral
development agencies, host government and donors, local governments and ministries,
even between the former GAM combatants. BRR was in the center of it all. It’s
something you have to live with and master in handling it.
Well, those are
just my personal lessons learned. If you are interested to read the lessons
learned documentations from Aceh experience, drop me a line through Contact
page and I will share with you the link to download the e-books compiled by
BRR. I surely cannot expect people to learn from the tsunami lessons learned
books/reports/papers so that they don’t make the same mistakes and put to
practice what worked well in Aceh. But I should expect from myself not to
forget what I learned from my time in Aceh and refer to it as often as
appropriate.
Maggy Horhoruw
Public policy & management consultant; photographer.
Maggy Horhoruw
Public policy & management consultant; photographer.
Categories:
disaster,
tragedy,
Tsunami Aceh
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