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In a sunlit room in the village of Lampeunrut, nestled among the rice paddies behind Banda Aceh,  Cut Dian Satiani, 30, weeps as members of her wedding party file by.

Whether she is shedding tears of joy or sorrow is hard to tell, but in Banda Aceh almost a year after the tsunami, it is safe to assume they are both.

Here, the evidence of what happened on December 26 last year is still so overwhelming that every step towards recovery and reconstruction brings with it a reminder of the tragedy's magnitude.

Ms Satiani's marriage, to driver Daud Abdullah, 37, is just one of thousands that have taken place over the past year as people in the disaster zone begin to put their lives back together.

'Before the tsunami, I was married and had two children,' says Mr Daud, a widower. 'Up until recently, I still had very strong feelings for them.

'This is a new beginning for me. Up until now, I have still been able to picture my dead wife's face, and I did not want to get married again until she was gone.'

In much the same way that Mr Daud  needed to erase that image before moving on, those tasked with reconstructing Aceh have needed  time to develop an accurate picture of what needs to be done, and to begin doing it.

After what was arguably one of the biggest  and well-executed emergency relief operations in history wound down in April, the next phase, that of reconstruction, has been agonisingly slow to take off.

Only now is momentum building, and nowhere is this more evident than in the town of Calang, about 120km along the coast from Banda Aceh. Here, about 70 per cent of its 10,000 people died and 99.9 per cent of the structures were erased by the waves, which struck the peninsula on which the town sits from three directions.

Because of the way the wave merged over the town, the water  was estimated to have been up to 17 metres high - more than deep enough to sail an aircraft carrier across town - and strong enough to scour the asphalt from the roads.

'Almost every structure  was destroyed,' says Joerg Meier, the health officer for the UN's Office of the Recovery Co-ordinator  in Calang. 'So it is one of the places where you can easily see progress being made.'

Indeed, people have started rebuilding,  albeit mainly with scavenged wood. The main commercial area, which contains a couple of fish stalls, some general stores and a couple of decent coffee shops, looks like something out of a John Wayne film, only  with motorbikes instead of horses.

Clapboard structures line the dusty road and it is  obvious there are no municipal services - no running water, sewerage or electricity. With most of the area's trees having been washed away, it is unpleasantly hot, yet the people remain.

'It's good that the city is growing again,' says Rukaya, 30.  'Before the tsunami it was really good here. There were lots of shops - it was the capital of this area.

'Now I get sad when I look around. I love this place and I miss the people who aren't here anymore.'

Rukaya  is still living in a tent, along with  Dia Otap Yani, eight, who was orphaned on December 26.

A massive push is underway to provide Rukaya and the 67,000 other people still living in tents with decent transitional shelter before the end of April. Privately, UN and other officials say  the fact that so many are still without a proper roof over their heads one year down the track is a 'disgrace'.

'Why did it take so long?' Mr Meier asks. 'Well, it is worth remembering that Aceh was until very recently a conflict zone and large areas were closed to us in the initial [emergency] phase.

'There were also about five or six months where it was uncertain whether we would be allowed [by the government] to stay.'

During those months, NGOs and other agencies had moved ahead with their own projects, and what efforts there were during that phase were characterised by a lack of co-ordination, inefficiency and, in some cases, outright competition between the agencies. The results were understandably mixed, and much of the real work remains to be done.

'We need to recognise it will take two to three years just to get what we need to do immediately  done. While you can see a lot of rebuilding here, it is all makeshift.

'In addition to housing and rebuilding people's livelihoods,  we also need a road to connect us to the rest of the region,' Mr Meier says.

The road between Banda Aceh and Calang was all but destroyed in the tsunami, and areas where it used to pass are now permanently submerged. From a helicopter - the only reliable way into or out of Calang aside from by sea - one can watch the old road disappear into the ocean at one point and then re-emerge at another some distance down the coast.

A crude dirt track has been pushed through, but it becomes almost impassable during the wet season, and is  unsuitable for heavy traffic. A new road through the hinterland is still some years off.

But the fact they are making progress means one  important thing: that the ceasefire between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government is holding. Before September, NGOs could only go outside the urban centres with an Indonesian army escort - although who was escorting whom was often hard to tell as the guerillas did not target aid workers, only the military.

There were even parts of the capital Banda Aceh where locals feared to venture after dark for fear of running afoul of either the military, GAM, or criminals taking advantage of the situation.

'What we need is peace,' says  Joel Ahba, 32, from the town of Lampuuk, about 20 minutes down the road from Banda Aceh. 'Now we have the [memorandum of understanding with GAM] things are better. Before you couldn't go anywhere without being scared, but now it's better.

'Peace is very important,' says Mr Ahba,  who used to run some beachfront bungalows before they were swept away - along with his mother, brother, nephew and about 90 per cent of the other people from his village.  'It is important for my business, because without it tourists won't come. If it is safe, maybe it will get back to like it was before.'

Lampuuk has become something of a poster-child for the recovery effort. With everything except its gleaming white mosque destroyed and only 1,000 of its inhabitants still alive, the population has taken it upon itself to rebuild.

Mr Ahba's   brother, Hasballah Ahba, 36, has become the head of Lampuuk's recovery effort. He gave up a lucrative job with an oil firm to guide the reconstruction.

And ramshackle houses and a couple of shops have started to appear.

'We have done this ourselves,' says Hasballah. 'In the beginning, the government did not want us to come back. But we have a good character here so we have been strong enough to do it without them.'

They have received help from a number of NGOs in cleaning up the village and rehabilitating the land. The US Agency for International Development  is funding the construction of a reservoir to store water from a nearby spring, and Unicef has helped rebuild a school. But for now, the funding for other projects has more or less dried up.

The tsunami brought with it an enormous amount of sand, and Hasballah  explains that most of their rice paddies are still under about 30cm of it. He points out the pretty  flowers that dot the landscape.

'That is called horse's foot. It used to only grow on the beach, but now it is everywhere because it grows in the sand.'

The villagers have been clearing one section of ground at a time and have already got some crops on the way. It will, however, be at least five years until things are back to where they were before the tsunami - that is the time it takes for a coconut palm to begin producing. And everyone who survived has a share in the plantation.

'In the long term, we would like to connect the water to everyone's house so we will make a proposal to the NGOs. I'll ask for them to give us the tools so we can do it ourselves. We always ask the NGOs for tools, not food. Food we can only eat once.'

Hasballah  says it is not enough to just rebuild Lampuuk to what it was before the tsunami. He wants it to be better.  It is a sentiment repeated along the  battered coast.

For while few will ever forget what happened that dreadful morning, those who remain, like Hasballah and the newly married Mr Daud,  are striving to give Aceh a new beginning.

'Our dream is big,' says Hasballah, 'but we have to start small and not wait for tomorrow when we can do something today.'



Long, hard road to rise from the ruins