Dear friends, actually our life has always been very very hard. We are poor and my father works for his children’s schooling, it was common for us to have to ask for help from people just so we could eat. Our life is really terrible, sometimes we have money to go to school but there are many times when we don’t and we have to stay at home and work in the brick factory, perhaps if there was not the brick factory we would not have been able to go to school at all. It is the only thing that keeps us alive.

“I never had any intention of going into aid work, nor did I have any experience; I had never even heard of Aceh and had no idea there had been a 30 year conflict. Watching the events of the tsunami unfold on my television in Greece, I could not pull myself away from it to part take in the Christmas/ New Year celebrations that were taking place around me. It seemed as though they had no meaning, the true message had been lost as had the lives of so many. As the death tolls climbed by the hour and the repeated message came across that there was an incredible lack of organisation the thought flashed through my mind I should go there and help.

I asked myself ‘Why after nearly 2 decades of working in Aceh do we still need to help?’ The answer is we are ‘creating a future, child by child’ we have not changed society or village level poverty yet.