By Bill Tarrant
LAMTEUNGOH, Indonesia, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Putri's baby is big.
At 4 kg (8.8 lb), baby Angi is, in fact, huge by the natal standards of Indonesia -- all the more remarkable since her mother has been living in a grim tsunami survivors' camp throughout her pregnancy.
Born on Sept. 23, Angi is the first known baby conceived and born after the Dec. 26th tsunami that killed more than 170,000 people and left half a million homeless in Indonesia's Aceh province on the tip of northern Sumatra. Angi, who is being bottle-fed because her mother's tsunami rations do not give her the strength to breast-feed, owes her robust health, at least in part, to a health clinic the children's aid group Plan International set up in her village.
Putri received vitamins, nutrient supplements and pre-natal care from the clinic during her pregnancy. A Plan-trained midwife delivered Angi in the military-style barracks camp Putri's family shares with scores of others.
Plan says it has set up at least 50 primary care units in tsunami-struck villages and distributed supplementary nutrient packages to 160,000 children and pregnant women in Aceh.
One of the great successes of the tsunami relief effort was that a feared second wave of deaths from diseases never happened.
DEPRESSED AMD ANAEMIC
Groups such as Unicef, Save the Children, Oxfam and Plan among others moved quickly to set up clear water and sanitation systems in camps housing more than a million tsunami survivors around the Indian Ocean rim.
Putri's baby is a welcome addition to the fishing village of Lamteungoh, where only 250 out of a population of around 3,000 survived the 10-metre high tsunami. As in so many other villages, three to four times as many women and girls than men were killed in Lamteungoh.
While baby Angi is fine, her parents are struggling.
"Most pregnant women here are anaemic so they need vitamin supplements," said 27-year-old midwife, Dassy Handayani. "They also need a lot of moral support. They get depressed about raising their babies in tsunami camps."
The tsunami took Putri's eldest daughter, Arlisa Putri, 11. But two other daughters, Surya Pertiwi, 6 and Sri Rejeki, 3, survived.
Putri clings to a notion that Arlisa somehow is still alive.
"I had a dream in the seventh month of my pregnancy that a white man found her and took her back with him, a Canadian named Michael. I want to believe this dream, but I'm not sure."
Life in the camps is undoubtedly contributing to depression spawned by tsunami trauma and loss of family members, homes and village life, aid officials said.
"Most of the cases we're treating are either gastric, upper respiratory or headaches," said doctor Mira of the British-based Islamic Relief Agency.
"We have to do more research, but a lot of these cases seem to be psychosomatic," said Mira, who like many Indonesians uses one name. "Most of the people are healthy but feel like they're sick."
The new United Nations Recovery Coordinator for Aceh, Eric Morris, said moving the 67,500 people still living in tents into intermediate shelters is the biggest priority, going into the rainy season.
"And probably conditions in some of those barracks are deteriorating, as well," Morris said in an interview.
FOOD RUNNING OUT?
The World Food Programme (WFP) is feeding around a half-million people in Indonesia alone, including nearly 100,000 still living in tattered tents.
But the minimum rations of rice, cooking oil and canned fish distributed once a month to tsunami camps were never meant to meet the full daily nutritional needs of recipients.
People in camps frequently complain that for one reason or another they sometimes miss out on even that minimal dole.
"The WFP and NGOs have done an amazingly good job, but it is a staple diet and people do need to diversify their diet," Morris said.
Indonesia's tsunami reconstruction chief said he has appealed to the WFP to keep the food distribution programme through to the end of next year to prevent malnutrition and related diseases.
"But should the WFP board not approve the request, or the international community not fund it, Aceh will go back to facing a humanitarian disaster of immense proportions," Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of Aceh's Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency (BRR), said in an interview.
"There is a perception that the emergency conditions have passed because we're now in the reconstruction phase. This is wrong. The problems are so great, the humanitarian needs are so immense, that the emergency continues."
More than 232,000 people were killed or left missing across a dozen Indian Ocean nations after a 9.15 magnitude earthquake, the strongest in four decades, unleashed the most devastating tsunami on record.