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Suraiya Kamaruzzaman had planned to spend no more than a week helping pick up the pieces of people's lives in tsunami-ravaged Banda Aceh.

But a sense of duty saw her quitting her academic life in Hong Kong for the long-term reconstruction of her home town.

The City University of Hong Kong researcher has filed away her hopes for a PhD and is raising funds for a new school and trying to rebuild a women's organisation in Aceh province.

Ms Kamaruzzaman, 36,  has been home  to the tsunami's worst-hit Indonesian province twice since the disaster.

'There were still  bodies everywhere when I got there and when I left - one month after the tsunami,' she said.

'When I saw all that, I couldn't stop crying because I knew all the people there. My cousin, my former colleagues, PhD graduates who had just finished their studies ... some people put photos up of their missing relatives but some did not even have that because it was all washed away.'

Two of the non-governmental organisations for women - Flower Aceh and Women's Solidarity for Human Rights Indonesia - have lost quite a few members, and Flower Aceh's office was badly damaged. Ms Kamaruzzaman said this had hindered attempts to offer women help.

'One woman we met was seven-months pregnant, but no doctors had been there to see her. She didn't feel the baby moving around anymore and her stomach had become smaller, but she could not get any help.'

She said some religious clerics were criticising dead women for being naked.  'They say if these women were good Muslims and wore the hijab, their clothes would not have been washed away and their dead bodies would not be lying there naked.'

Ms Kamaruzzaman  hopes to establish a permanent trust fund for women in Aceh. She is due to present a paper at a UN conference this week on behalf of City University on the state of women in Aceh after the tsunami.

'What we need to do now is recovery and reconstruction - to rebuild the women's organisations and to build a modern Muslim school.'

'The school will need a library, language lab, a computer lab, a new dormitory, scholarships, salaries for teachers,' she said, adding a trauma counselling room was also needed.

Ms Kamaruzzaman estimates she would need to raise several million Hong Kong dollars.

'Sometimes I feel I'm not strong enough to do this. But I have a situation in life much better than others and so have a feeling that I have to do something.'



Academic quits HK to help tsunami-ravaged town