Five years later, the tsunami remembered
Keri's smalls hands are clasped tightly together, as she concentrates on remembering the day that a giant tsunami swept her out of her family's home in Banda Aceh, North Sumatra, tearing first her father from her grasp, then her pregnant sister and finally her mother. She was nine years old then.
She cannot remember what happened after the foul water, thick with bodies and other horrors, closed over her head. "I was paralysed," she says, her foster father helping her translate the word. When she floated back to the surface and rescue, she saw her mother's unconscious form for the last time.
She still doesn't know where her family's bodies are buried.
Keri is 14 now. She has a new life, lives in a new house with new "parents" and new sisters. She's stopped having nightmares, is no longer afraid to go to the beach with her friends and, most of the time, she chooses not to think about the day that brought the destruction of everything she knew.
"I don't like to look back," she says quietly, summing up the feelings of so many people in Banda Aceh.
It was five years ago on Boxing Day that the Indian Ocean tsunami struck coastal communities throughout much of South East Asia, leaving a black misery of bodies and ruined lives in its wake. The exact number of dead in the 13 countries damaged by the waves will never be known, but at least 160,000 of the quarter of million estimated total fatalities occurred in and around Banda Aceh - damaged first by the huge earthquake, whose epicentre was just 150 miles out to sea, then swept by the wave that raced far inland just a short while later. A further 500,000 survivors were left homeless.
On Saturday, December 26, the city's residents will gather in remembrance at the imposing white central mosque, which survived the tsunami – many in the devoutly Muslim region believe miraculously – while all other buildings around it were flattened. This anniversary has an air of particular significance as it marks the end of the five year aid projects and will be followed by the withdrawal of all but a handful of foreign NGOs from the city, leaving the region to its own devices at last. It is a time of hope and also of concern for those who live there, and who like Keri have built new lives for themselves on the rubble of tragedy.
For the teenager, much of her recovery has been due to the efforts of the woman she calls Aunty Julia - a remarkable grandmother, whose courage, religious faith, and open-heartedness characterises so many in Aceh. It was she who first took the nine-year-old orphan, the daughter of a distant relative of her husband, back to the beach in the weeks after the tsunami, and led the crying child step by step into the water to help rid her of the terrors it held for her.
And for all those months Keri was having nightmares, Julia slept with her in her bed. "Pity on her, her mother is dead," she said, with tears in her eyes.
In the weeks that followed the tsunami, in which Julia's own house and all her belongings were washed away, she worked to bring clothes to others even less fortunate. Later she set up, with support from abroad, classes to teach other women - many widowed and alone - how to make quilts from which they could earn an income.
The horrors inflicted by the tsunami provoked acts of selflessness and charity, both from the outside world and from within Banda Aceh itself - a city where political and religious complexities are as tangled as the twisted metal skeletons of the wave-ruined houses that still remain.
Effectively isolated from the rest of the world during 30 years of bloody civil conflict, Banda Aceh was swept into international consciousness after that Boxing Day morning in 2004 as images of miles of flattened homes and ugly, dark lakes of bloated, disfigured corpses were broadcast to a disbelieving West waking from its post Christmas slumber.
The international response was unprecedented. Almost $7 billion of donations were pledged to the affected countries from across the globe, $4 billion of which was from individual donors, and thousand of NGO workers flew in to help organise the recovery effort.
Within Indonesia, the scale of the catastrophe instantly brought to a halt three decades of fighting between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and government forces from Jakarta which had left an estimated 15,000 dead and countless others the injured victims of vengeful atrocities. A peace accord signed in Helsinki the following year led to a degree of autonomy for the region, and the city's current governor is a former spokesman for the armed rebel movement, an unthinkable state of affairs before the tsunami.
For those who survived with their families relatively intact, many say that the end of the war means daily life is better now than before the wave came.
"Before, you could not go out after dark because of the fighting, people were always frightened," recalled 24 year old Nora who runs a small juice making business.
The rebuilt infrastructure has also led to many improvements. Now a smooth, wide road cuts across the swathe of land once devastated by the tsunami and leads to Banda Aceh's new port.
Thousands of newly-built red or turquoised roofed little houses provide homes for families who lost everything. Lives have been rebuilt afresh from the rubble of tragedy.
At the port, the fishermen who were out at sea when the wave struck and returned to find their families and homes had been washed away have built new boats, and the fish market is a noisy and colourful centre of activity again.
Chris Clark, head of the World Food Programme;s logistic operations in the Aceh region, is optimistic that the improvements for the community made through the efforts of his and other aid agencies will be long-lasting.
"People here are capable, knowledgeable and resilient and there's a strong work ethic," he said. "There's been a lot of change over the past five years. There's more vibrancy in the community. In the evening, shops are alive and people are active - and physical development has a lot to do with that."
But like the 2,600 ton generator ship, that still sits – a surreal tourist attraction - amid family homes miles inland where the giant wave dumped it, or the sweeping green parks that are in fact mass graves covering tens of thousands of bodies, disturbing reminders of the tragedy are never far from sight.
So huge was the amount of money that poured in, aid organisations struggled to spend it all. As a result some projects were at best ill-thought out. The gleaming $7 million building of a planned tsunami museum, still utterly empty and as yet unused, stands as an eye-catching, but perplexing, testament to the questionable splurging of cash.
More than 130,000 new homes have been built since 2004, along with schools, roads and other infrastructure. It's an impressive feat, but even though UN representatives say there is still "uncommitted" cash of around £40 million, a significant number of people remain homeless, particularly women who – in a society where men traditionally carry out most business negotiations – did not have the skills or the confidence to access the aid they so badly needed.
John Penny, the EU's envoy in Banda Aceh, acknowledges some people did take advantage of the aid projects while others who should have received help didn't get it. However he believes the overall the recovery programme in Banda Aceh, dealing with both the conflict and the tsunami, has been a success.
"There are still many homeless people and it's true the benefits have been unevenly spread," he said. "But I do think that generally there's been an upgrade in the way people live, and most people have seen things get better."
As the remaining aid agencies prepare to pull out, there is a mixed response from the local community. While the influx of foreign cash undoubtedly led to inflated prices, it also created work. Now many from Aceh who had good jobs with the NGOs are struggling to find employment.
And, while most people, including Mr Penny, say they are confident that peace will continue, former GAM rebels speak of their fears about what will happen once there is no longer an international presence to keep a watchful eye on how Jakarta treats the semi-autonomous region.
Yet others seem keen to see an end to foreign involvement. A peculiar series of non-fatal shootings, aimed at foreign representatives, was unleashed in the city last month. Mr Penny was among those targeted, though he survived unscathed.
The culprits remain unidentified, with police blaming an unknown group "who just want to cause trouble". Mr Penny himself said he believed the incidents were unlikely to escalate, while most residents were dismayed at the attacks.
But with the adult population scarred by years of violence and loss, the greatest hope lies with the children of Aceh.
At primary school 34, supported by charity Unicef, the children giggle and show off to visitors. It's a stark sign of the scale of the tsunami's death toll, that it is considered to have escaped relatively lightly with "only" 20 of its 240 pupils killed.
Ibu Naima, the vice principal, said staff had worked hard to create the cheerful atmosphere. "The teachers all did a trauma healing programme and we were encouraged to spread it out to the children and create a happy environment so they could forget," she said.
It seems impossible that those who survived the tsunami in Aceh will ever forget. Problems certainly remain and how those are handled now will be vital in determining whether peace is sustained.
But five years on, through a combination of outside generosity and the courage of those who survived the tsunami, Banda Aceh is a better place than it seemed possible to imagine it ever could be.
On this anniversary, Keri will be among the thousands attending special memorials in mosques - in some places the only buildings still standing after the tsunami swept through - to honour those who died.
But they will also be looking forward to a future which was once unimaginable. In Keri's case, she cherishes the ambition of one day going to medical school and becoming a doctor.
How badly did she still miss her old life and the family that was swept from her on that terrible December day? She paused for a moment, her face flickering with emotion as she reflected silently on what she had lost - and on the life that she, helped by Aunty Julia, had rebuilt for herself.
"I'm happy, now," she said.