"During the earthquake I couldn't walk, I couldn't stand. I held
on to a tree as the ground swayed," says Murni, a 51-year-old
woman living in a village in West Sumatra, Indonesia. "My head
hurt from the shaking." Though Murni and her family made it
through the September 2009 quake alive, their house collapsed.
For weeks they lived in their yard under plastic sheeting.
Across the palm-dotted countryside, thousands of villagers were
doing the same. All in all, the earthquake affected almost a
million Indonesians, many of whom make a meager living farming
rice or coconuts. Some villagers' houses were still standing,
and looked okay. But telltale diagonal cracks and falling
plaster showed that the homes were unsafe. The government
determined that 249,000 were damaged. Few villagers were willing
to risk sleeping in the old structures. Living next to the ruins
of their houses, villagers tried to salvage materials like doors
to build new homes. But they rarely had enough to make a safe,
livable building. Knowing th