Word: tsunamis
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...have spent two weeks in Thailand reporting on a tsunami that has transformed its famous beach resorts into corpse-strewn ruins. One night, exhausted, my clothes reeking of death, I try calling a colleague in the hard-hit Indonesian province of Aceh. I simply misdial, but the recorded message gives me chills: "The destination you have dialed...
Aceh did exist, of course, but with 166,000 dead or missing it had borne the brunt of the Indian Ocean tsunami, triggered by a 9.15-magnitude earthquake off the Indonesian coast on Dec. 26, 2004. It was a truly international catastrophe: the tsunami struck 13 countries, killing 226,000 people of 40 nationalities. Five years later, a first-time visitor to the worst-affected countries - Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand - might find the wave's terrible path hard to detect, thanks to a multinational, multi-billion-dollar reconstruction effort. Across Aceh, thousands of houses were built with foreign...
...four-year-old nephew Azeel. She had dreamed he was still alive. "He's a very handsome boy," she told me, "with skin as white as yours." Did she find Azeel? Probably not. The missing stayed missing, the dead stayed dead. (See TIME's 2005 cover on the tsunami...
...return to Aceh today is a heartening experience. Billions of dollars in reconstruction funds have poured into the province, and it shows. Banda Aceh, where the tsunami killed 60,000 people - a fifth of the population - is now bustling and prosperous. There is a new hospital and airport, and tourist shops selling I-love-Aceh T-shirts. (See where the next five big earthquakes will...
...signed a historic peace deal with the Indonesian government in 2005, in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, which claimed about 160,000 lives in Aceh alone. Today, Aceh's governor is a tsunami survivor and former GAM rebel called Irwandi Yusuf, whose background seems tailor-made for REDD: he was trained as a veterinarian and once worked for FFI. "He's one of the few Indonesian politicians who gets it," says Linkie. "He's thinking way beyond his five-year electoral term." In June 2007 Irwandi banned commercial logging in his province, "an unprecedented environmental...