The largest peacetime aid and rescue operation has swung into action in south Asia. Lynne O'Donnell reports from Meulaboh in Sumatra.
Crammed into what once served as the government headquarters for the stricken city of Meulaboh, on the west coast of Aceh, thousands of people crouching in family groups on rattan mats laid out on a hard, cold, white-tiled floor received an esteemed visitor yesterday when United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan dropped in to see how they were.
Annan wandered around the building, talked to some of the still-dazed people who wander in and out with a glassy-eyed disorientation, chatted with some of the few military and aid people who have made it this far south, and climbed back into his chopper to head north for Banda Aceh, the provincial capital.
His descriptions of the damage wrought by the massive tidal wave that devastated swathes of South Asia have already entered the historical annals: the worst blight on mankind since the end of the second World War, the biggest relief effort in the history of the world.
And the enormous sums donated by people all over the world, touched by the images of devastation that have defied a collective global imagination, keep hitting jaw-dropping heights.
But Annan might have just stopped by one of the large green tents standing on the grass opposite the front door of City Hall and asked Dr Denny Irwansyah how things are in Indonesia, where the death toll stands at just over 100,000, with at least the same number injured. If he had, Denny would have told him: "It's like a ground-zero situation here" - no government officials or administrative infrastructure, no doctors or nurses or professionals of any sort, no shops or food outlets. If the Indonesian army had not arrived on December 28th, the region would have plunged into anarchy.
"Everyone had to run," says Denny, who deployed to Meulobah nine days ago with the First Medical Battalion Field Hospital of the Indonesian army, a rapid emergency response group. "Most people in need from the area come here, and we have been concentrating on treating disease - bronchitis and chest infections, pneumonia, neglected wounds and, of course, we have been doing amputations."
Two weeks after the giant wall of water triggered by an underwater earthquake in the early hours of St Stephen's Day slammed into a vast circle of coastal communities in South Asia, it's a race against time to prevent many thousands of the survivors joining the death toll. The devastation caused by the tsunamis shocked even Colin Powell, veteran soldier and the world's highest ranking diplomat, who was overcome by what he saw during a three-hour helicopter tour of the Indonesian coastline early this week.
"I have been in war and I have been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I have never seen anything like this," said the Vietnam and Gulf War veteran after a swift helicopter ride over Banda Aceh.
Like other leaders from across the world, Powell has pledged unconditional help to South Asia in its recovery, and appeared willing to mend the rift between the US administration and the United Nations in order to ensure that aid is swiftly and effectively targeted at those in greatest need.
The special summit held in Jakarta this week heard promises that the US Secretary of State summed up in a single sentence: "We will do everything we can to contribute."
Those pledges so far add up to billions of dollars, and will involve tens of thousands of international troops and relief personnel, many of whom are already working around the clock, in scorched-earth conditions, to put into effect the expectations of people from Dublin to Durban, Melbourne to Mexico, eager to share what they have with those hundreds of thousands in Asia who now have nothing.
As people all over Aceh's coastline slowly make their way to field hospitals in relief hubs such as Meulobah and Banda Aceh, their wounds, already rendered septic by the filthy water, are festering in the humidity and heat. Many people die before they can be helped, many are having limbs amputated. The most unfortunate survivors of the tsunami carnage die of blood poisoning and blood loss after their infected limbs have been removed.
"We have enough drugs and food," says Denny, thanks to the early American aid drops. "What we really need is fresh water and sanitation facilities like latrines, for the refugees."
Local water resources were swamped by the seawater, which mixed with waste and sewage to become a toxic cocktail that has made the landscape look more like a ferocious fire has swept through, burning everything to brown.
The aid effort here on the remote coast, up to 300 kilometres south of Banda Aceh, is hampered by the wreckage. Roads that disappeared under the water have been further damaged by aftershocks, such as the one on Thursday, which measured 6.0 on the Richter scale. Even passable roads south of Meulobah are seriously fissured by quake damage. Ships cannot enter Meulobah because the harbour two kilometres away has been wrecked. Supplies from ships moored on the coast have to be brought in, laboriously, on smaller boats.
Added to the difficulties in bringing help to those most in need, Annan would also have heard that in west Aceh alone, about 100,000 people are homeless and receiving daily deliveries of rice, dried fish, wheat biscuits and other staples that keep them alive.
Add that to the figures, still being collated, for the country as a whole - the most recent estimates are 102,000 dead and more than half a million homeless - and it is easy to understand why this disaster has elicited such an outpouring of sympathy across the world.
While hundreds of Indonesian volunteers are arriving in stricken regions from the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, few foreign aid organistions have made it to Meulobah. Those that have - mostly Red Cross and medical teams from Singapore and Japan - are sorely needed and warmly welcomed.
The spirit of giving appears to have inspired a global unity, with disparate cultures, fractious nations and seemingly intractable opponents coming together for a common goal. However, some cynical commentators have suggested that the Bush administration's motive in offering help is to improve its international image after two years of opprobrium over the war in Iraq.
There is anecdotal evidence to support the claim that some US aid lifts have been staged for the television cameras, but there is little doubt that any other nation could have mobilised such a massive military relief effort within 10 days and distributed such enormous quantities of food and medicine to some of the poorest and most remote places on earth.
Other commentators have attributed the western outpouring of sympathy to the fact that many people from rich countries take cheap holidays in some of the devastated regions, notably Thailand and Sri Lanka, and that it is only in this way that they can identify with the extent of their loss.
The suggestion from Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, that stricken nations should be relieved of their debt burden was not greeted with enthusiasm everywhere. Australian Prime Minister John Howard echoed opinions expressed by people standing on a Phuket beach surveying the wreckage of their lives when he said that cancelling debt would give no guarantees that money needed for relief and reconstruction will meet its intended destination.
Many of the tsunami-hit countries are notoriously corrupt, with the rich/ poor divide obscene, and aid and loan funds often disappearing into the pockets of the rich. Donations to non-government organisations and through national treasuries at least have a good chance of being funnelled to those in real need.
The total debt of the affected countries - India, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Burma, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia and Indonesia - is, according to the Times of London, £192,407,000,000. For some of the countries that are doing well in the development stakes, wiping out their debt burden would damage their international credit standing, not something a sensible government wants to do.
But Barbara Stocking, director of Oxfam, says: "The tsunami crisis has proved that people can and do care about others on the other side of the globe."
Writing in the International Herald Tribune this week, she said that parents anywhere could feel the pain of parents in the blighted areas who had lost their children in the deadly waters.
"The tsunami may go down in the history books as one of the world's most tragic natural disasters, but the global wave of compassion and solidarity that followed it could be equally historic," she wrote.
Her optimism that the global grief could lead to a global awareness "that abject poverty and suffering do not have to - and must not - exist" may be naive. But in the weeks since the tsunamis, both Stocking and Kofi Annan have focused on the idea that humanity is united in its similarities and need not be divided by differences of culture, politics or socio-economic categorisation.