Six months after a powerful earthquake reduced much of two
Indonesian provinces to rubble, IOM is still building thousands of
temporary homes, providing support services to badly injured
survivors and transporting hundreds of metric tons of supplies into
the quake-affected areas.

The 27 May, 6.3 magnitude quake struck at dawn off the coast of
Java, killing 6,000 people and injuring 50,000 more in densely
populated Yogyakarta and Central Java provinces.  Entire
villages were levelled, leaving an estimated 1.5 million
homeless.

One of the first to respond to the disaster, IOM launched its
temporary housing initiative three months ago, opening a
centralized manufacturing facility in Yogyakarta where sufficient
bamboo components for the construction of up to 180 temporary homes
are pre-cut and assembled by a workforce of 360 people each
day.

IOM tapped into Java’s traditional cooperative village
mechanism known as gotong royong to organize a construction process
that is supervised by local university engineering students. Over
5,000 of the durable homes have been built thus far, with a further
7,000 targeted for completion by the end of the year.

IOM’s migration health unit, which helped close to 5,300
people return home from hospital in the weeks after the disaster,
is now focusing its support services on thousands of badly injured
survivors.

Working with the Yakkum Rehabilitation Centre and the NGO
Handicap International, IOM provides round-trip transportation for
hundreds of people who have suffered serious spinal injuries.

It has participated in training sessions for area physicians and
hospital administrators and, on 9 December, will hold a one day
seminar on medical rehabilitation services for senior physicians
and health planners from the provincial health office.

IOM has also conducted post-disaster assessments of
earthquake-damaged medical infrastructures, supported the US Marine
field hospital in Bantul district, delivered roughly 500 kits for
pregnant women and those with newborns, and participated in
community-level mental health trainings.

IOM’s fleet of 170 trucks and 58 light vehicles continue
to operate at capacity. It has transported more than 575,000 bamboo
poles to Yogyakarta to support the government’s
home-construction programmes and 60,000 metric tons of food and
non-food items for a total of 141 organizations and government
agencies.

In mid-November, IOM also transported 23,000 kgs of
pharmaceutical waste from Yogyakarta to Bogor, West Java, at the
request of the World Health Organization.

For more information, please contact:

Paul Dillon

IOM Indonesia

Tel. +62.8126988035

E-mail: "mailto:pdillon@iom.int" target="_blank" title=
"">pdillon@iom.int