Women Helping Women after the Tsunami
By Melanie Brooks, CARE

ACEH BESAR, Indonesia - Having a baby is supposed to be a time of joy, but for Asnawiyah, it's a time of uncertainty, fear and shame. When the tsunami hit, Asnawiyah, eight months pregnant with her first child, struggled to run with the rest of her village to escape the deadly waves.

For two days she walked, barefoot, seeking shelter, sleeping on the open ground. Now, she lives with 900 other people in a temporary camp where women's rights and needs are far at the bottom of the list of priorities.

"I'm very happy I'm going to have a baby. I've waited so long," said Asnawiyah, 35, "but I can't be as happy as I should be because of these conditions. How can I have a baby here? How will I breastfeed in front of all these people?"

Dr. Nuretha and her team are working in 75 temporary camps in Aceh to address women's issues.

The tsunami that surged through the coastal villages and cities of Indonesia took more than 250,000 lives. But for women, it took their dignity as well.

Most women in Aceh province, where Asnawiyah is from, are conservative Muslims. They cannot appear in public without a headscarf, and staying with men who are not from their own family is taboo.

How, then, does a woman in a temporary camp live in a tent with six other families — including men?

CARE, one of the many international agencies delivering emergency relief and rehabilitation in the more than 75 temporary camps in Aceh, is working to address women's issues in the camps.

In addition to distributing food, water purification kits and emergency supplies, CARE has assembled a team of health workers to deal specifically with women in the aftermath of the disaster.

Led by Dr. Nuretha Hevy Purwaningtyas, female CARE workers go from camp to camp to deliver prenatal care, teach women about reproductive health and nutrition in emergency situations, and deliver hygiene kits, condoms and oral contraceptives.

When the tsunami hit, many women fled with nothing but the clothing they wore.

"When an emergency happens, you think mainly about the immediate needs: food, water, shelter. But for women, there are so many other things you have to consider, that are also extremely important," said Dr. Nuretha.

While men simply go down to the river and strip naked to bathe, women step into the water fully clothed, headscarves on, and try to wash themselves under their clothes.

They then walk back up the riverbank, sopping wet, and step into the tent to change — putting their dry clothes on over top of their wet ones, then pulling off the garments from underneath.

The whole process takes more than an hour, and the result is that the women are clean, but their new clothes are now wet, too. In this humid tropical climate, being wet for so long has caused women to develop an itchy rash all over their bodies.

"It never goes away," says Asmawati, who fled to the camp with her two children. She rolls up her sleeves to reveal her affected arms. "It is from being wet all the time. Our clothes are never dry."

The women in this camp have tried to make things as organized as possible. They strung sarongs from the poles in the tent, sectioning off separate areas for each family.

Their bed rolls and pillows are stacked neatly at the sides, the bags of donated rice and plastic cups and plates carefully cleaned and stored.

In the first month of the emergency, Dr. Nuretha has distributed hygiene kits to about 1,500 families in the camps.

But some aspects of a women's life are not so easily organized. When the tsunami hit Asmawati’s village, the women fled with nothing but the clothing they wore, not even shoes. Three of the women with Asmawati were menstruating.

"They had no sanitary napkins, and we had no rags to give them," she said. "The women were very ashamed. They cried, but there was nothing we could do."

In the first month of the emergency, Dr. Nuretha and her team have distributed hygiene kits to about 1,500 families in the camps. The kits include toothpaste and toothbrush, shampoo, underwear, clothing, washing pail — and a month's supply of sanitary napkins.

Today, Dr. Nuretha gave Asnawiyah and the two other pregnant women in the camp delivery kits with a large plastic sheet, towel, swaddling blanket and antiseptic soap. The women will take the kits to the local midwife when they go into labor.

It doesn't resolve Asnawiyah's worries about where her family will live in the future, but at least she knows the delivery of her baby will be that much safer.

"It is hard to be a woman in the camps. There are so many things I used to take for granted," she said, looking around the crowded tent that is now her home. "So you can't understand until you're here how much it means to us that other women are looking after us."