By Ahmad Pathoni

ULEE LHEUE, Indonesia, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Deny Syahputra, 24, lives alone in a wooden house built by an aid agency after his parents, sisters and a brother were swept away in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that smashed into this Indonesian port town.

"I hope that my family are in heaven now," he said on Tuesday as prayers commemorating the disaster began at a nearby mosque.

"When I remember, I feel sad, but I realise I'm not alone in having this experience. It kind of gives me comfort to know that other people also suffer the same thing," he said.

Two years on, Indian Ocean communities have made impressive strides in recovering from a mind-boggling disaster, thanks to an army of aid workers and an astounding outpouring of charity across the world.

But tens of thousands of people are still living in temporary shelters in Indonesia's Aceh province, worst-hit by the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami that killed or left missing about 230,000 people along the Indian Ocean rim and left around 1.5 million homeless.

And the psychological scars are still fresh for many people who lost entire families to the monstrous waves.

Syahputra was selling fish when he felt the 9.1 magnitude quake that triggered the waves. He tried to rescue a neighbour's child before the waves swept her from his arms and carried him for several kilometres, he said.

He was one of 600,000 people in Aceh who lost their livelihoods after the disaster. He is selling fish again in Ulee Lheue, a ghost town after the tsunami but now rapidly recovering with ferries and fishing boats using rebuilt port facilities.

BACHELOR TOWNS

Even so, the population of the town near Aceh's capital of Banda Aceh, 1,700 km (1,060 miles) northwest of Jakarta, is only about 700 now, a fraction of what it was before the disaster.

The tsunami left around 169,000 dead or missing in Aceh alone and killed at least three times as many women as men in places such as Ulee Lheue, leaving virtual bachelor towns in coastal regions.

Aid groups and the agency charged with Aceh reconstruction, BRR, have built 57,000 houses for the half million people displaced by the disaster. Another 20,000 are still being built.

While the home rebuilding effort has been slow, reconstruction is evident throughout the province, where aid agencies have spent billions of dollars on the recovery effort.

In one city market, Nursidah, 30, told Reuters as she shopped for groceries: "Activity here is very much like before the tsunami."

Yon Thayrun, a spokesman for aid group Oxfam, told Reuters: "Actually, if we want to be honest, reconstruction has gone very well. You can imagine we are not building like one subdistrict but we are rebuilding an area the size of Liverpool."

Transporting rebuilding materials, particularly to areas outside Banda Aceh, has been a major logistical hurdle because the quake and tsunami ruined the main coastal highway, he said.

Thayrun estimated 70,000 people are still in temporary housing, a much higher figure than the BRR's 45,000.

With aid pledges totalling $13.05 billion for tsunami-affected nations, in addition to the billions set aide by governments in the affected regions, there is no shortage of money for rebuilding.

The tsunami disaster generated an unusually strong response from non-traditional aid groups -- nearly two-fifths of the money pledged came from private individuals and companies.

The U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery says the unprecedented disaster and its unprecedented response yielded valuable lessons in disaster recovery, including:

-- The importance of disaster preparedness

-- Recognising families and communities must drive their own recovery

-- Promoting fairness and equity in reconstruction

-- Coordinating well with the expanding number of non-governmental organisations, big and small

-- The crucial role of information sharing to recovery

-- Creating conditions for entrepreneurs to flourish. (Writing by Bill Tarrant, editing by Jerry Norton and David Fogarty; ahmad.pathoni@reuters.com; Reuters Messaging; ahmad.pathoni.reuters.com@reuters.net; tel +6221-384-6364))

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