Summary Updates
by Saiful Mahdi

2pm. Visit Saree Aceh village in Aceh Besar, about 60 kms from Banda Aceh to measure and picture the location for a proposed boarding school with Sylvia Agustina, an Acehnese young architect and urban planner just graduated from University of Washington, Seattle, and Juanda, founder of PCC. Unfortunately, we learned that the land we want to use to build the proposed boarding school is still in dispute among the villagers. So we decided to postpone the idea to set up a boarding school (a school plus YMCA-like facility).

PCC with 1001 Books Network of Volunteers has set-up a community library in Saree, a computer course for adolescents, and sewing projects for women.
 

Community library in Saree Aceh. The books are from 1001 Books Network of Volunteers (www.1001buku.org) an organization which also works with AcehKids (www.acehkids.org).

On the way home from Saree, we stopped by the site of one of the barracks being built by the government for IDPs. The barracks are basically no better then the IDP camps. Each barracks have 12 units of rooms of 4 m x 5 m. Each unit is said to be for 5-6 persons. We step in the barracks to see that privacy is not one of the considerations for the government. Each unit has an open ceiling and this design flaw allows people from other units the possibility of climbing and sneaking other units.
 

A barracks site in Lambaro. The Indonesian government is building barracks for 35% of 400,000 IDPs in Aceh. However, many IDPS have already decided to go back to their original villages.

The environment of the barracks sites is usually no better than the IDP camps.