Brook Weisman-Ross ’94 returned to Indonesia to help put things back together.
By Shane Donaldson ’99Photos Courtesy of Brook Weisman-Ross
It was mid-June, and Brook Weisman-Ross ’94 was exploring a village in Indonesia just west of the city of Banda Aceh. It was six months since the tsunami that hit on December 26, 2004, had shredded the Indonesian coast, as well as parts of Sri Lanka and India.
To Weisman-Ross, the land looked as if it had been shoved back to the beginning of time. As he walked with one of the villagers, Weisman-Ross was overwhelmed by the enormity of the destruction. “My companion pointed out the fields, and said, ‘we are not starting from zero,’” Weisman-Ross reported, “‘we’re starting from less than zero.’”
At the time, Weisman-Ross had been in Banda Aceh for nearly three months as part of the global relief effort helping areas devastated by the tsunami. An assistant vice president in cash management at Citizens Bank, Weisman-Ross went overseas on a fully paid, three-month sabbatical that was the result of a partnership between Citizens and Plan USA.
Weisman-Ross was sent to Banda Aceh to serve as a project manager with Plan USA. While in Indonesia, he worked directly with 40 refugee camps on rehabilitation and reconstruction projects. Among the specific projects he worked on were the building of homes, schools, and health centers. He also helped develop plans for providing victims with clean water.
Weisman-Ross was chosen for the project because of his extensive knowledge of the land and fluency in the language. In 1983, he had lived in Indonesia for a year while his father, Neil Ross ’62, M.A. ’67, worked there on a one-year U.S. Agency for International Development small-scale fisheries project. At the time, Neil Ross was on leave from URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Weisman-Ross later returned to Indonesia as part of a study abroad program while earning his anthropology degree at URI, and then again as a research assistant while working toward a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Tennessee.
Weisman-Ross is the Indonesian interpreter for Citizens Bank, and he has long been active with the Indonesian community in Rhode Island. His mission on the relief effort was to coordinate with Plan USA’s office at a base camp with 15 Indonesian staff members and begin the process of funding a cohesive network of construction and rebuilding in 40 specific communities.
“It will take them years to clear their fields and be able to farm again,” said Weisman-Ross, who began his sabbatical on March 20, 2005. “They don’t even have the tools to begin that phase—they don’t have hammers and saws to be able to rebuild. They are piecing together what they can without any tools.”
“The magnitude of the damage overwhelmed me,” Weisman-Ross said. “When I traveled beyond the city of Banda Aceh itself, it was just 1,000 miles of devastated coastline. I was constantly reminded of images of the firebombing of Dresden and other historical sites where entire cities and communities were literally wiped out.”
The word ”disaster” doesn’t begin to describe what happened around Banda Aceh. While other countries had death tolls in the 10,000s, this land saw more than 220,000 perish. Husbands, wives, and children vanished. Whole families and entire communities simply no longer exist. It’s a land that lost more than 4,000 teachers and thousands of medical practitioners.
“It’s going to be at least three years before everyone has a house and stable food and water supplies,” Weisman-Ross said. “It’ll take at least 10 years before anyone there is going to say that life is back to normal. This is not a finished disaster. This is not something that has been rectified so that everyone has a place to sleep. Most people are living in tents, and these tents, after six months of rainstorms and winds, are tearing apart. People are living outside during the monsoon season. They don’t have sanitary living conditions in most cases.”
On a scale of 1 to 10, Weisman-Ross puts the recovery effort at about a two at this point. “The work really has just begun. It is still very much in the emergency relief phase,” Weisman-Ross said. “Plan USA workers are still trucking water to dozens of villages every day, but there are hundreds more who need it. We are still working every day on ensuring people food security, much less basic shelter from the rain.”
The effort Weisman-Ross put in while in Banda Aceh was strenuous, and he knows he has made a difference in thousands of lives. The sad part, however, is that he knows there is so much more left to do. “Has there been a lot of work? Absolutely,” he said. “But there are 700,000 people who have lost every single thing, from their homes to their tools to their children. They still need so much more.
“We need to be able to help them to grow vegetables and catch fish so they can have the protein and the nutrients that they need. These people can’t live the rest of their lives waiting for the weekly distribution of these critical resources. They need to be able to build them, and catch them, and grow them on their own.”
Weisman-Ross returned to the United States on June 19, 2005, filled with mixed emotions. He remains involved and is in contact with the staff in Aceh and the relief team in Indonesia.
“I feel a large sense of grief and remorse for the hundreds of thousands of people still waiting for critical aid,” Weisman-Ross said. “I have very mixed emotions—I know I can do much more. However, I do believe that I helped to send the organization and its staff in a strong direction. They are moving forward, expanding constantly, and not leaving any village behind in any area we’ve already been in. We are making sure aid gets straight to the people in a sustainable, long-term, permanent way.”
Though he was back home now with his wife, Merith Weisman-Ross ‘94, the coordinator of the Feinstein Center for Service Learning at URI, Weisman-Ross was still struggling with what he’s witnessed: “Every day I passed through the city center, which was laid waste down to rubble and where tens of thousands of people were killed. Every day I passed along the coastline, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed. I still can’t believe the magnitude. Three months, and it’s still unimaginable to me what occurred there just six months ago.”
If you would like to support some of the program’s Weisman-Ross worked on, please visit the Web site planusa.org or call 1-800-566-7918.
Shane Donaldson ’99 is a reporter for The South County Independent.
