Aceh and Back Again: Five Days on the Ground After the Floods

The Aceh River moved like it had unfinished business. 

The rain has finally let up, and the sun is out. Still, standing on the riverbank, watching the currents lick at my muddy boots, I feel the same dread that hangs over the displaced Indonesian villagers around me. The river could take everything again, without warning, without ceremony.

It’s been a month since intensified floods and landslides tore through Sumatra, killing over a thousand people and injuring thousands more. The monsoon rainfall that kept Singapore cool in December told a different story here—one of levelled buildings, power outages, and widespread infrastructural destruction. 

What hit Aceh wasn’t officially labelled a cyclone, but the devastation bore the fingerprints of Cyclone Senyar. Climate change and years of deforestation did the rest, leaving the land with nothing left to hold on to.

Relief was slow, or didn’t come at all. Political sensitivities and logistical friction caused vital aid to be stranded between checkpoints or halted by mere bureaucracy. 

In some areas, there’s a cautious stance toward foreign assistance—shaped in part by post-tsunami sovereignty concerns and by Acehnese hopes that the local government will take a more active role in supporting their own communities. I hear it in conversations with humanitarian workers; I see it in the way volunteers stretch dwindling supplies, doing whatever they can while waiting for formal support.

I’m doing the same, but as the only foreigner involved in the efforts on the ground.

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