Homes, jobs elusive for some Indonesian tsunami survivors

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Dec 25 (Reuters) At 30, Beti has to raise her four young children alone after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami snatched her husband, and she has no regular job.

Two years after the disaster, she and her children are still cramped in one of the barracks built to house survivors in Indonesia's hardest-hit province of Aceh, where the giant waves left 170,000 local people dead or missing and half a million displaced.

''I wished I had something I could call a house,'' Beti told Reuters. Her partitioned 20-square-metre (180 sq ft) shack at Lhong Raya in the provincial capital Banda Aceh is furnished with a foam mattress, a television and radio.

''I have heard promises, but up until know I still don't know when I will get a house,'' said Beti, who wears a maroon Muslim headscarf.

Beti said the households in the barracks, where clean water is scarce, receive nothing other than 10 kg (22 pounds) of rice, seven ounces of cooking oil and five packs of instant noodle every month.

She does odd jobs to survive, often cleaning bottles at a nearby water depot for 25,000 rupiah (less than 3 dollars) a day.

Beti's family is one of 3, 000 which did not own property before the tsunami and have been categorised by the government as former renters or squatters. About 45,000 people still live in the barracks.

Aid groups and the agency charged with Aceh reconstruction, BRR, have built 57,000 houses so far. Another 20,000 house are still being built and expected to be completed at the end of March 2007.

RECONSTRUCTION WOES But Beti's wait for a house may be in vain.

BRR will not give those former renters and squatters houses and will instead give each family 40 per cent of the value of a house built for survivors who are entitled to property, said Heru Prasetyo, the director for donor relations at the agency.

They can use the money to buy land and apply for micro-credit to build a house, he said.

BRR had earlier promised that 78,000 houses of 128,000 required would be finished by the end of the year, but some work has been delayed because of the difficulty in finding contractors that can carry out large-scale projects, BRR chief Kuntoro Mangkusubroto said.

''We are three months behind and we apologise,'' he told reporters over the weekend. ''We can tell everybody that we have worked very hard, but the truth is there are people who are not happy and that's the way it is. We will improve what we can improve,'' he said, adding that all houses should be completed by mid-2007.

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