The Guardian has tracked the fortunes of Nusa, Indonesia, since the deadly wave. A decade on, the shockwaves are still being felt

In the afternoons, after days of heavy rain, the boys in the village clamber up the wall of the shed, letting out screams of elation as they jump into the swollen river in their underwear. Clamber, jump, swim – repeat. By the riverbank their mothers slap soapy clothes on a concrete slab while their sisters catch fish in clear plastic cups, holding them up for communal inspection when they manage to scoop one up.

For most of the children, life in the Indonesian village of Nusa has always been like this. They are too young to remember the day that people were swimming for their lives – not just for fun – after school. The devastating tsunami, sparked by a 9.1-magnitude undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean, smashed down on 14 countries on Boxing Day 2004 and hit the Indonesian province of Aceh the hardest.

Along the coast, entire villages were instantly flattened as the tsunami, which in parts reached as high as 30 metres, rolled through. The disaster claimed the lives of a total of 286,000 people, including 221,000 killed or missing in Aceh alone.

Residents in Nusa remember that Sunday morning when a panicked bule, or foreigner, called David screeched into the village in his four-wheel-drive car with his Acehnese wife and children. From the nearby coastal village of Lhoknga, where he lived, the Australian man had noticed the ocean rapidly retreating. As the water was sucked out some villagers ran to collect the beached fish, but David sensed there was going to be trouble.

“You have to run to higher ground now,” he yelled from the car as he passed Nusa’s residents on the road. “A huge wave is coming.”

In a tight-knit village the screams travelled fast. Nelly Nurila was baking in her kitchen when she heard the commotion. She rushed outside and followed others up the dirt path to the hilly jungle behind the village.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baiturrahman Grand Mosque two days after the Boxing Day tsunami destroyed much of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, above, and how it looks today, below. Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

Her husband, Mukhlis, sprinted a few doors down to get his grandmother, escaping toward the hills with her in his arms. As the mass of black water hit they gripped the nearest tree as the water and debris pounded over them.

Only Mukhlis was strong enough to hold on. The spot where the Nusa boys now swim is where his grandmother was washed away.

Others, from the safety of the hillside, gathered to watch the horror unfold. “We could see everything below,” recalls Nurma Sulaiman, pursing her lips and shaking her head. “People were screaming for help, but we could not help. The wave – a wall of muddy water – was tossing up bodies and tearing houses apart.”

In the decade since Nusa residents descended the hill to survey the carnage – the dead and half-dead floating through what remained of their village – life has slowly been pieced back together. Elephants have dragged trucks from the fields and wastelands have been turned into farmable areas. After years of living in temporary barracks, residents have moved into more than 200 new houses built by international aid.

These days the only time they consider the tsunami is when the earth moves beneath them. And then, says Nurma, their first instinct is “to bolt to the mountain”.

Passing through the steel archway that marks your arrival into “Gampong Nusa”, or Nusa village, following the road that winds past the old mosque and school and continues on toward the lush rice paddy fields that flank the houses on each side, a new visitor would never know the deadliest tsunami in history had once ripped through.

The Guardian has tracked the fortunes of Nusa in the past 10 years. Only weeks after that Boxing Day we arrived to find the entire fabric of its society wrecked. A year later, the village was still struggling under the enormity of the disaster.

But today things are different. The only discernible clue to the devastation is the clumps of light pink houses donated by aid organisations – each one the same shape and design.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An aerial shot taken in December 2014 of Lampu’uk, Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

Alongside the new village meeting hall, one of the most tangible signs of lives resurrected is Nelly Nurila’s factory. Before the tsunami Nelly ran a small baking business from her kitchen but now her factory produces 40,000 bread rolls, stuffed with sweet fillings such as coconut and green bean, each day.

Next to a framed holograph picture of Mecca, one wall in Nelly’s office is lined with certificates of business excellence, but she is humble about her success.

“It’s not that big,” says Nelly, in white diamante-studded hijab. “But now I have a special place for production. Before, I did everything from my house.”

After the tsunami Nelly received bread-making equipment from Bogasari, one of Indonesia’s largest flourmills, and her business now employs 48 people.

Her product, which takes the village namesake Nusa Indah, or “Beautiful Nusa”, is sold across the province.

Nelly’s business is Nusa’s big success story, but pretty much the only one. A handful of others have achieved a measure of success but their gains seem minor in comparison.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nelly Nurila inside her Nusa Indah factory, the village’s biggest success story 10 years on from the tsunami. Photograph: Kate Lamb/The Guardian

Take Muliana Nazruddin, a dressmaker who lost everything on that day. She was given a sewing machine by a global aid agency. From the profits of her small tailoring business, over the years Muliana has made enough to add three rooms to the simple house that she received from charity CARE, as well as buy a big TV and a zebra-striped couch.

She has a steady stream of orders but is still saving up to buy a button-making machine worth Rp300,000 (about US$25).

Kamelia Bachtiar, 31, who days after the tsunami started selling vegetables outside the school with her parents, has since put herself through computer college. She now has a job at the public works agency in the capital, Banda Aceh, braces on her teeth, and a family of her own. Her mother has since reopened their street stall, selling basic goods such as washing powder, crisps and fried bananas, earning about $800 a month.

Their next-door neighbour, Muhammad Dahlan, 67, has also revived his large garden, living off the sale of his cloves, chilli, turmeric, ginger and coconut in a nearby market.

Yet for all the money and international expertise that poured into Aceh following the tsunami, it’s hard for residents not to wonder where it all went. These days most in Nusa say they are worse off than they were 10 years ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Muhammad Dahlan in his garden in Nusa village, Aceh, Indonesia. Photograph: Kate Lamb/Guardian

It’s true that, courtesy of international aid, most people have a better house and maybe even a motorbike, but most livelihoods have taken a hit. In a village where more than 55% of the population depends on farming, the fields are far less productive than pre-tsunami days.

“The yield from the rice fields is far below maximal now because as soon as there is heavy rain it causes instant floods and that threatens the crops,” explains local farmer Muhammad Yasin.

An irrigation system for the paddy fields was never built after the disaster and now when it rains the crops are not only inundated but infested with snails.

Indeed, before the tsunami, Nusa’s fields were filled with cassava plants, which are much taller and more resilient than rice. The village was even famous for its cassava chips. But locals say the cassava market dropped and they planted rice without realising how much their productivity would drop.

Local imam Samsul Fuadi, pointing at a brown patch of land from inside a village coffee shop, said: “Most of the land is not even cultivated any more. And people don’t have the capital to redevelop it.”

It is not just here that there have been major shortfalls in rehabilitation. Across from Samsul in the village coffee shop – a cornerstone of Aceh’s non-drinking culture – several young men have spent a morning smoking cigarettes and avidly watching a show about killer hippos on Nat Geo Wild.

“In my opinion there needs to be a focus on community development. People need skills,” says Samsul, “People shouldn’t be waiting for job opportunities – they should be creating them, but they don’t know what to do.”

Since the aid organisations left, the local government has failed to improve the level of education and investment needed to generate more opportunities for the young. Aceh has one of highest failure rates at high school across the country. In Nusa, only 24% of residents have finished high school and only 6% have a degree.

And at a time when the province desperately needs investment, throughout Aceh there are numerous reminders of post-disaster development projects gone wrong. Factories built by well-meaning international agencies to process salt and cacao, and farms meant for breeding prawns, even brand new universities, lie unused. In one case, a former aid worker bemusedly recalls, Acehnese were given livestock to start farms one morning, only to have sold the animals by nightfall.

A student at a school in Banda Aceh shows her drawing of the Boxing Day tsunami. Photograph: Rein Skullerud/World Food Programme

In Nusa, when 28 women were given sewing machines to start their own dressmaking businesses, they were never taught them how to use them.

“Only five of those women still use their machines now,” says Muliana of the initiative. “And if you don’t use the machine it just sits there and rusts.”

Next to Nelly’s bakery, the people of Nusa say that one of the biggest changes post-tsunami is the negative impact the flows of aid money have had on social values. Cash for work programs intended to incentivise people to clean up the land post-disaster have created a lasting sense of entitlement that has proven difficult to reverse. “Suddenly everyone was given all this money,” says Muhammad Yasin of the problem, “and then they didn’t want to work any more.”

A new term has even emerged in the local vernacular to describe how the Acehnese felt about the vast flows of development cash. The saying “Yoe peng pemerintah, jadi hana payah pulang” translates to: “It’s government money so we don’t have to return it.”

But the tsunami did leave another – unexpected – legacy. In a resource-rich province where separatist rebels from Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) had been fighting for independence from Indonesia since the 1970s, there is now a lasting peace agreement.

In a country prone to earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions, the tsunami has also forced the government to take preventive action.

Since the disaster, tsunami warning towers have been built along Aceh’s coastline and a sophisticated tsunami warning system is now in place. A new national disaster mitigation agency has also been established, sending out key information any time a natural calamity strikes across the country. Indonesian students can now study disaster management at university.

And some lessons have been learned. When an earthquake hit Java in 2006, the government avoided repeating some of the mistakes made in Aceh, this time giving funds directly to people to rebuild their houses. The result: more houses built in a shorter span of time.

Summing up Aceh’s reconstruction process in one sentence, former aid worker and researcher on post-tsunami rehabilitation Ibnu Mundzir says overall it was a “good operation”, but one that “could have been significantly better”.

Ibnu points first to the logistical challenge of coordinating a nearly $7bn reconstruction fund shared between some 500 organisations and 12,000 projects, as well as the time constraints. Organisations were under pressure to spend the money and were not necessarily thinking long-term. “The catch cry of the reconstruction, to ‘build back better,’” he says, “was compromised by building back faster.”

Given the scale of the disaster, though, it was inevitable there would be mistakes. Rebuilding critical physical infrastructure such as roads and ports is largely viewed as successful, but other elements were much more challenging.

In villages where the demographics were turned upside down, where disproportionate numbers of women and children were lost, there is no quick way to restore the social fabric.

Back at the coffee shop, Samsul says Nusa fared significantly better than its neighbours. Nusa lost 24 people. But a few kilometres away in the coastal village of Lampu’uk, more than 5,000 died. Everything was flattened except the mosque and a few trees. With dozens of empty houses, Lampu’uk still feels like a ghost town.

In the decade that has passed since the tsunami, religion and humour have provided enduring sources of strength to the resilient Acehnese. Even a religious man such as Samsul can joke about the tragedy and Lampu’uk nowadays.

“If a woman from Lhokseumawe meets a man from Lampu’uk,” he chuckles, “She might say, ‘Yes, I will marry you, but I’m not living there’.”