Sixty-eight of his neighbors, as well as his pastor perished, and Habapiri doesn't want to move back to the place where his home once sat.

Date: March 20, 2005

TSUNAMI, AND GOVERNMENTS, RE-DEFINE HOME FOR SURVIVORS.

Habapiri's face is sad. And compared to many people displaced by December's tsunami, he has less obvious reasons to be sad. Although his family survived the tsunami's "attack," the word used universally to describe the sea's invasion that morning, Habapiri's sadness illuminates the challenges ahead of him as much as it does the trauma behind him.

"As the water rushed into our village," he recounts from the rubble of his house in Sisarahili II on the west coast of Nias, an island west of Sumatra , "we ran to our neighbor's house which had two floors. My wife and I stood in the second-floor windows, holding onto the window frame, with one child hanging on each arm. The water was to our necks, but we stood there for two hours until it went down."

Sixty-eight of Habapiri's neighbors perished, "trying to outrun the water," he adds. "We thought if we were going to die, we wanted to die in our village, together." Now, that same village that kept together and saved his family is a village to which he doesn't want to return.

"We don't want to go back to our village," he says flatly. A farmer, Harapiri doesn't depend on the sea like so many families affected by the tsunami. While most fisherfolk desperately want to rebuild their seaside villages, families like Harapiri and his neighbors, even though they live over a mile inland, are hesitant to return. "The next tsunami might be in two hundred years," he adds, "but it might be tomorrow, too."

But Habapiri's options are limited, as they are for those wishing to return to their villages. In Habapiri's case, his options are two. One is to accept a proposal from the government to relocate just over a mile away, even further inland, but in one-room houses that measure only twelve feet by twelve feet. Accustomed to rudimentary living accommodations by developed countries' standards, even these families find the option of a 144-square-foot room simply unfeasible.

The second option comes from a church that has offered to build homes for families - provided the families furnish the land. Habapiri's only land is that to which his family cannot fathom returning. "We don't want to move back," he reiterates, "but we probably will have to. We cannot afford to buy land elsewhere."

Habapiri's predicament lies in stark contrast to those of people from seaside fishing villages. From the temporary camps they now live in, those who daily harvest the sea long to return as quickly as possible; something their governments are loathe to do. Many governments instead want to rebuild fishing villages further inland, to hedge against another sea-borne calamity. Many fisherfolk, in Indonesia and India alike, simply say they will accept where their governments help them rebuild, and then build a smaller hut nearer the sea, for the man to live in and fish from and to guard his boat and nets. Humanitarian organizations fear that this practice will fracture important family and community structures, and are committed to representing the desires of the people they serve by organizing them into groups that have a better chance of being heard by their governments.

"It's like asking a dairy farming family in the Midwest to rebuild its house 3 miles from where their barns and cattle are," comments Barbara Wetsig, Lutheran World Relief's Associate Manger for Asia and the Middle East and Manager for tsunami relief. "Keep in mind," she continues, "that these fishefolk don't jump in their pickup trucks and drive off to work. This is a manual society, so the catch is brought to the market, and to their homes, by hand, or by a bicycle-powered cart," she adds. "The governments' plans will add hardships to these families' already difficult lives," Wetsig adds. Veterans of post-disaster relief and rebuilding, LWR and other agencies will work with communities and with governments to ensure that the needs of those they serve are being met.

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