Agile in the fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic: lesson learned from Aceh’s readiness and acehnese’s local wisdom dealing with the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Acehnese have a long history of disaster preparedness due to their experience with natural disasters, including tsunamis and epidemics. Aceh province was the first province to respond and anticipate the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 before other provinces in Indonesia responded. During the COVID-19 outbreak, Aceh has benefited from many lessons from collaboration at the central, regional, and village/gampong levels by the government and PENTAHELIX actors such as communities, academics, religious leaders, mass media, entrepreneurs, philanthropy, and local wisdom combined with modern technology for cross-border mobility. This study was cross-sectional with a qualitative approach. Collecting data was conducted by interview, observation, and documentation, with a purposive sample. On June 9, 2020, in-depth interviews were done online with the head of the Aceh Agency for Disaster Management (BPBA) via Zoom meeting. The presentation of the data was done descriptively. The regional government and Ulama in Aceh collaborated to accelerate the handling of covid-19 and followed up at the gampong/village level by forming a gampong/village on COVID-19 alert, and each gampong set up a shelter for guests from outside to self-isolate for 14 days and carry out the local wisdom of the Acehnese people which has been done for a long time to deal with COVID-19. Acehnese’s local wisdom is salt, water in the jar (le lam guci), henna on fingers (pakek gaca), chewing betel leaf (pajoh ranup), burning rice (tuet leumang), isolation of the sick, and hold a prayer, is obtained from the plague experience in the past.