Smash hit

In fact a dazed Suli, 21, had the presence of mind to hand Fajriyana over to a teenage girl who passed her on to a woman with her own family.

“That woman was so good that she took Fajriyana to the United Nations so they could take her picture as a lost child,” said Nasruddin. “We had given up hope, so we didn’t look at the photos, even though they were on show at the UN office near our tents.

“Then one day a Unicef worker came around to check on us and he saw Fajriyana’s photograph. He said, ‘God willing, we have found your daughter’. And it was so.”

Nasruddin lost his tools and cannot get work except as a labourer. For Fajriyana, whose name means “born at dawn”, every new day is fraught with uncertainty. For Aceh, the costs are still hard to grasp.

“Challenges are huge,” said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of the Indonesian government’s reconstruction agency. Highly regarded as a dedicated technocrat, Kuntoro had sharp words for some foreign aid agencies that rushed to join the high-profile relief effort but have not fulfilled their promises.

The aid bonanza has been good for taxi drivers and landlords. Hoteliers demand £70 a night for seedy rooms. The one restaurant that serves beer in this strictly Islamic town is jammed with thirsty aid workers every night.

But Kuntoro said he wanted a harder effort to meet targets for rebuilding 30,000 homes this year and 80,000 in 2006. Half a million people are homeless and 120,000 houses were destroyed.

Living in a drab wooden barracks outside Banda Aceh, one 15-year-old orphan of the tsunami is already intent on dancing her way into a new life.

Uswatul Hasanah is not the kind of girl to sit around and wait for a bureaucrat to decide her future.

“My mother is gone. My father is gone. Two of my brothers and one of my sisters are gone,” she said. “There are seven of us children left. I found my own father’s body with his ID in the pocket. I am not staying here.”

Hasanah dreams of being a model. Unlike most dreams in Aceh, this one might come true. She has joined dance classes for tsunami children run by a choreographer who is so impressed with her poise that he is organising a trip to the capital for her.

What, she was asked, would the traditional conservative elders of Aceh make of that? She shrugged. “I have my own life now,” she said.

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