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Raising the money is just the beginning. Delivering the supplies to the people who need them turned out to be the greater challenge. That meant confronting a practical, political and cultural obstacle course that slowed down aid to the most desperate areas while everyone learned the shortcuts. In many places, the roads that were bad to begin with are gone now and the ports swallowed whole. With bulldozers scarce, elephants have been enlisted to help clear debris. When pilots try to fly into a small airport, they find that the maps are suddenly wrong because the landscape has been rubbed away. Precious hours were lost when the lone airstrip in Banda Aceh was closed after a 737 hit a water buffalo while trying to land. "We need to make small, damaged airstrips some of the busiest airports in the world," says the U.N.'s Jan Egeland. In some Sumatran villages, it was impossible to deliver any goods at all until the U.S. and the Australian military showed up with amphibious vehicles that could stage beach landings. Sari Galapo, a U.N. volunteer in Batticaloa, was worried about the people on an island no one had heard from since the bridge to the mainland was washed out, so she set off by canoe. "The boat was barely above the water level, and I didn't want to look at the water," Galapo says. When she arrived, she discovered that the local government official had lost most of his family to the tsunami, become depressed, poisoned himself, and was hospitalized. In the meantime, no aid had got through until Galapo sounded the alarm.
When the physical hurdles are conquered, the political ones remain. In India, where 10,000 died and 6,000 are missing, the government was determined to portray itself as an advanced nation that can manage its troubles and made a point of dispatching its own relief workers to aid other countries in the region. The government was especially sensitive about foreigners invading the Nicobar islands, where the military keeps a secret electronic-listening post. Sparsely populated and almost impossible to reach in normal times, the islands are home to some of the world's last Stone Age tribes--five groups, with populations of 30 to 250, of Pygmy Africans and Mongol hunter-gatherers who stalk wild pig in the rain forest with bows and arrows. They were believed to have been wiped out by the tsunami, until a relief helicopter attempting to assess the damage was fired on by tribesmen shooting poison arrows.
Across the Nicobars, the International Red Cross estimates a death toll of 30,000 out of a population of 50,000. Meghna Rajsekhar, 13, saw the ocean swallow her mother and father, and after floating at sea for two days on a wooden door, she washed up on a Car Nicobar beach that was swarming with snakes. Newspapers wrote of refugees in Great Nicobar fending off crocodiles as they trekked through the jungle in search of water. For Aisha Majid, the tribal leader of Nancowry, an island filled with the homeless, the government's actions make no sense. She asks, "When the government can help other countries, why are they letting us down?" Says fellow survivor Aslam Majid, 22, who went five days without water: "People aren't dying from the tsunami. They're dying of thirst and hunger."