One year on, tsunami survivors remember...and rebuild

BANDA ACEH, Dec 15 (Reuters): One moment Sartinah Fatar is painting her lovely new traditional Acehnese house, chattering happily to her husband.

The next she's in tears recalling the day the sea roared in and snatched away her mother and two children.

It's the slogan of the Indonesian reconstruction agency, set up after the December 26 tsunami killed 231,452 people around the Indian Ocean rim, most of them in Aceh.

Sartinah and hundreds of thousands of other tsunami survivors are doing plenty of both as the anniversary of one of nature's most ferocious episodes approaches on December 26.

Sartinah's family is one of the lucky few that have a new home.

More than 1.5 million people are still living in tattered tent camps, military-style barracks or crammed in with relatives in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Even the dead cry out for better shelter.

Near Sartinah's house in Kampong Java, a fishing community in Banda Aceh, is a crude hand-painted sign.

"This is a mass grave," it says.

"Don't throw garbage on our mortal remains and soul.

Allah has called us.

Let us rest in peace." Indeed, for two miles into Banda Aceh the tsunami erased everything, leaving a bleak landscape of cement and tile foundations that resemble big burial slabs in a vast graveyard.

A quarter of Kampong Java's population of 5,000 survived the 9.15 earthquake, the strongest in 40 years, and the series of tsunami waves it spawned.

ASKING FORGIVENESS Sartinah's family was eating breakfast when the quake rattled the dishes off the table.

They ran outside, joining others who were racing in from the beach shouting "the water is coming".

She ran with her husband to the elementary school next door, her 8-year-old daughter close on her heels and her 18-year-old son helping his frail grandmother.

Sartinah was about to haul herself onto the roof of the school when the waves, taller than the palm trees in the yard and travelling faster than a train, slammed into her.

She never saw her daughter, son and mother again.

"I was hanging onto the roof and thinking I never had a chance to ask for my mother's forgiveness," Sartinah said, the tears flowing down her cheeks.

"As a Muslim you have to ask forgiveness.

If your mother doesn't forgive you, you can't go to heaven." The disaster of biblical proportions drew a veritable Noah's Ark of faith-based groups to the tsunami region, including Muslim Aid, which is building 172 traditional Acehnese homes in Kampong Java.

Some survivors wondered why God had unleased such terrible fury on their communities Overall, the international community raised more than $11 billion, "the most generous and most immediately funded international emergency relief effort ever", UN emergency coordinator Jan Egeland said.