The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53 arly in January 2005, within days of the tsunami disaster in Indonesia, our phone in Alexandria, Va., rang. “Mar- garet, have I got a deal for you! The U.S.-Indonesia Society is starting an Aceh school project,” said longtime friend retired Ambassador Alphonse La Porta, a former Jakarta neighbor and then president of USINDO. “Would you coordinate it?” I gulped. We first went to Indonesia in 1967, when my husband was assigned to the embassy political section, and have spent most of our professional lives in the Malay world. I taught English at the University of Indonesia and, with four children, got involved in education design through the tran- sition of the Joint Embassy School into the Jakarta International School. I then repeated the process in Cebu, Philippines and — needing a portable pursuit, as trailing spouses do — parlayed my growing experience into a range of public education, project development and intercultural communications undertakings. But I had never built any- thing (well, the vice consul’s house in Kaduna, Nigeria, but that’s another story), and had never been in Aceh. Plus my Indonesian was creaky. “Yes,” I replied. Amb. La Porta, who had been consul in Medan, the biggest city on Sumatra, filled me in on USINDO’s plan. Founded in 1994 by the former American ambassador to Indonesia, Edward E. Masters, and former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas, the society represents the best of the long-term binational associations that are an outgrowth of individual Foreign Service engagement in countries and regions. It conducts wide-ranging public education pro- grams such as open forums, seminars, publications, scholarly exchanges and cultural performances to foster better under- standing between Americans and Indonesians — but had never done bricks and mortar. The society’s decision to help in Aceh came in response to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004. After the earthquake fractured buildings, the tsunami scour- ed everything up to two to three kilometers inland along the west coast of the province on the northern end of Sumatra, the epicenter of the disaster, then continued around the tip and a short distance along the Straits of Malacca. Whole communities had been swept away, leaving 170,000 people dead and half a million displaced (out of a pre-tsunami pop- ulation of about 4.2 million). Some 3,000 schools and 2,500 teachers were lost, as were about 1,000 civil servants, the backbone of provincial and local government. Aceh, located at the northwest tip of Indonesia’s island of Sumatra, was already one of Indonesia’s poorest provinces, despite vast riches in oil and minerals. The province had been wracked by 30 years of conflict between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement, devastating much of whatever infrastructure existed, including schools. It suffered from endemic corruption (when the tsunami hit, the governor was in jail and the acting governor was in charge), and has been essentially isolated from the rest of Indonesia. Even so, Aceh has its own proud historical memory and language, and a sense of identity as an ancient center of trade and education — the “front porch” of Islam in the country E Margaret Sullivan, the wife of a retired FSO, has spent four decades living in or working on issues related to Indonesia and the Malay world. “P AINTING THE S KY ”: A S CHOOL G ROWS IN A CEH I N THE WAKE OF THE TSUNAMI , A U.S. NGO COLLABORATES WITH I NDONESIANS TO BUILD A SCHOOL THAT PROMISES TO HAVE A LASTING EFFECT . B Y M ARGARET S ULLIVAN