SYAH KUALA, Indonesia – Driving through streets of misery, aid trucks pull into makeshift camps, drawing crowds of tsunami survivors who smile with gratitude – and then ask for more.
“We need more tents,” a young man in tattered clothes tells relief workers as they unload boxes of high-protein biscuits at a camp that is home to 2,500 people and growing.
Traveling with an aid convoy Friday from one destroyed village to the next in this region on the northern tip of Sumatra, a reporter finds a thread that binds: Everyone has nothing and their needs are enormous.
The official death toll from the tsunami climbed dramatically to 147,000 Friday and authorities held out little hope for tens of thousands still missing.
Outside a community center, where several dozen people have been sleeping under a ripped tent, a man pleads for face masks to try to ward off the stench of death from uncollected corpses.
Down the road, at a mosque that has taken in the homeless, a woman begs aid workers to help a woman who lost her husband and is on the verge of giving birth. “We need a midwife,” she says.
An international lifeline of critical supplies is arriving daily at the airport at Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and one of many communities left devastated when the tsunami sent walls of water crashing into coastal villages on Dec. 26.
Relief workers say they are gradually overcoming the problems that plagued the start of aid distribution, and that the complex supply line needed to feed and medicate masses of survivors is now running more efficiently.
In neighborhoods around Banda Aceh, tents have been pitched outside mosques, on university grounds and inside government halls – the buildings that stood up to the catastrophic quake and waves.
Linking the camps are neighborhoods that didn’t make it, some little more than debris-cluttered fields. On the sidewalk of one street, a body bag had been put out for collection. On another sidewalk, a woman sat wailing: “My baby is gone.”
At a government building in Syah Kuala, where 90 people have taken refuge, the arrival of biscuits prompted a list of questions and pleas.
“What about milk?” asks Siti Murni, a 50-year-old woman with no front teeth dressed in a T-shirt and sarong. “Can we feed this to our babies?” She also asks for more clothes and women’s undergarments.
The United Nations started building more permanent refugee camps in and around Banda Aceh on Friday, which will have better facilities and hold a total of 8,500 people. U.N. officials say they hope the camps can open within a week.
For many survivors it will mean at least a temporary end to the search for a home.
In the district’s largest camp, where 2,500 people have pitched tents beside the mosque of Syah Kuala University, one boy said he doesn’t know where home is anymore.
“My village turned into the ocean,” says 12-year-old Muksalmina, who like many Indonesians uses one name. “And now, I can’t find it.”
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