Today, some say Banda Aceh is a better city not because of its new roads and sparkling new hospital, but because there is peace. Critical to rebuilding trust in a highly combustible society, says Mangkusubroto, was the focus on community engagement.
Yet the approach saw projects stalled for months, sometimes years. Important documents such as land titles and birth certificates were washed away so land ownership could only be determined by interviewing the surviving residents about who owned what, and cross-checking the answers to eventually map out land rights each village. Victims took shelter across the city, in mosques, camps, and the remaining safe houses of friends and family, so the process was protracted, but it was the only way.
The final results revealed the extent to which communities had been turned upside down. Orphans were now landowners and entire families had been wiped out. In other cases, the land where people's houses once stood was now irreversibly submerged. For the most part Aceh was built on the same lines, but in some cases the tsunami completely gauged out the land, altering the landscape and forcing former residents to relocate.
Community consultation was the only way to determine what had once been, and it was also seen as the best way to determine what would be. Mangkusubroto says he decided early on that the Acehnese should choose how they wanted to rebuild their lives and shape their future, rather than have it dictated to them by the government or international aid agencies.
This approach trickled down to community consultation about basic decisions such as whether the tsunami survivors wanted health clinics, new, wide escape roads, and even drainage in their village. Again, it was a very time consuming process. And on closer inspection there was a major miscalculation of local needs.
"Aid organisations were under pressure to spend the money," says Muslahuddin Daud, reeling off a list of empty facilities spread across the province. Driving along the $250m USAid built road from Banda Aceh to Calang, another town practically destroyed in 2004, there is a huge abandoned university, water treatment plant and most noticeably, hundreds of abandoned houses, a common site across Banda Aceh and its surrounds.
In the small seaside village of Lampu'uk – where the gigantic mosque was the only building that survived the tsunami – hundreds of houses donated by Turkish Red Cross are unoccupied. "Many of the houses are empty because they are owned by orphans, or if they are old enough they have moved," says 56-year-old resident Harun from his porch, "Others are afraid to live in the village now." Harun is the local schoolteacher but these days there are not many students. Of the 600 junior school children in Lampu'uk before the tsunami, only five survived.