ALL the consolation and despair of the people of Aceh were summed up in the face of Nasruddin as he pressed his lips to the forehead of his three-year-old daughter Fajriyana, the precious child he had commended to the will of God and given up for dead.

Swept away by the tsunami that killed her mother, Fajriyana was found by strangers and cared for until an aid worker recognised her picture and reunited the family almost four months later.

Now her home was a refugee tent. She played on planks perched above the monsoon mud. Her bed was a mat and her food not much better than gruel. But she was alive, and in her face, Nasruddin said, he saw once again his late wife’s smiles and laughter.

Fajriyana’s tale of loss and rediscovery has passed from tent to tent among the families huddled against the rains, a proud people dependent on the kindness of strangers ever since the tsunami struck the isolated Indonesian province of Aceh last Christmas.

The quake and waves left 232,000 dead or missing in 12 nations around the Indian Ocean, according to official estimates. Nearly 170,000 of them were in Aceh.

Any example of hope to mitigate the collective grief is welcome as the Boxing Day anniversary of the disaster approaches. Yet mourning is turning to frustration at the slow pace of rebuilding, despite a worldwide outpouring of sympathy reflected in the global village of aid agencies contending to do good amid the ruins.

There has even been a ceasefire in the brutal war between the Indonesian army and separatists of the Aceh Freedom Movement. But much hinges on local elections next year and the guerrillas are reluctant to disarm.

To most people, though, politics takes second place to survival. A year has not been long enough to soften the memory.

When the first great wave engulfed his house, Nasruddin, a 45-year-old motorcycle mechanic who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, had gone out to buy Fajriyana’s favourite snack of meatball soup from a street foodstall.

He raced back, crying out to his wife Halimah, 40, to save their youngest child. She seized Fajriyana and as the water rose, she clutched at an electrical cable, holding on to her squirming bundle.

“But when a second wave came, she lost her grip on the child and Fajriyana was carried off,” said Nasruddin. “Halimah’s body was never found.”

Like a ragdoll, Fajriyana was whirled away on the torrent. Yet a youth named Suli pulled her onto a mattress. They floated to safety.

Nasruddin found his son and two elder daughters alive late that day. “After three days we stopped looking for the rest of the family and we concluded that the youngest and her mother were gone,” he recalled.

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