Oxfam’s Ian Bray gives us this account on the aid emer­gency in Indone­sia a week after the earth­quake. Aid is begin­ning to flow in to vil­lages that were destroyed as roads and air­ports are begin­ning to open up again.

You can place dona­tions to Oxfam’s relief efforts at this page of their website.

This is the vil­lage of Padang Alai a two and a half hour drive from the city of Padang. It has seen bet­ter days. About 90% of the houses are destroyed. The school is a mass of bricks.

Oxfam is truck­ing water into Mursidah’s vil­lage but get­ting there is not easy. The road is nar­row and full of large cracks. The more trucks that pass the more dam­age is done to the road. Land­slides have gouged the sur­round­ing steep hills. The hills remain unsta­ble and there is a fear that the heavy down­pours of rain­ing sea­son will cause more land­slides. The gov­ern­ment has issued storm warn­ings for the next few days.

Nine vil­lages in this area were cut off for some time before the roads were cleared and two vil­lages are still only acces­si­ble by foot. On the day the earth­quake struck there were 200 peo­ple attend­ing a wed­ding in one of the vil­lages. The vil­lage is now a tomb.

This is the area where the earth­quake did its worse. If the houses weren’t shaken to obliv­ion they were buried under tons of earth, boul­ders and trees as hills gave way.
…

The scale of the earthquake’s dam­age is slowly being revealed as the more remote areas are reached. So far some 125,000 houses are destroyed, leav­ing around 500,000 peo­ple home­less, 55 health facil­i­ties are piles of rub­ble, nine bridges are down and 162 roads are in urgent need of repair.

In a dis­play of human­i­tar­ian mus­cle the United States has sent in a ship equipped with heli­copters to help with the logis­ti­cal strug­gle to shift the huge amounts of aid required. The aid effort is gath­er­ing pace and much more vis­i­ble as aid teams fan out to the vil­lages of a wide-spread ground zero.

Aid was being deliv­ered in the imme­di­ate after­math of the quake. The first few days of a dis­as­ter are cru­cial. In that time it is nearly impos­si­ble to get sup­plies in. Tele-communications are down, air­ports closed, road­ways blocked. The smart money is spent on hav­ing aid there ready to go before the human­i­tar­ian cav­alry has time to arrive. But decid­ing where to place emer­gency aid stocks is tricky.

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