CHAPTER 3 – Weeks of Tension
During the remaining evenings approaching the end of 2004,heavy rain poured down incessantly in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital which many indigenous citizens still lovingly called Betawi. In the few intervals when the rain abated, some end-of-the-year trumpet sellers caressed their wares, which they hoped would in a few days bring them their long-awaited small fortune. No one suspected that it was the advent of a savage disaster; a disaster that destroyed not only the fortune of the trumpet sellers but also changed the face of a large portion of the earth.
Tsunami. Like the meatball soup that burst on the table when the fragile bowl broke, the Indian Ocean was raked up by a super-fast power and poured over, washed away, gulped down and crushed everything from inanimate things to living beings. It was so fierce and so swift. “That day, no single person could have withstood it,” said Cut Nyak Daud, Panglaot of Lampuuk, recalling the fatal Sunday morning of December 26.
In Jakarta our faculty of perception was too limited and mediocre to digest and comprehend the calamity that befell Aceh. The flow of information was too limited. Almost all telecommunication and transportation facilities were cut off. Aceh was left alone by itself; isolated.
SMS through mobile phones frantically crisscrossed the air waves, while the truth of the messages was unclear, undefined. The number of victims was also conflicting, further confusing our emotions. First it was 3,000, then around 20,000, a few hours later it was tens of thousands. The figures kept on rising. Other messages told of dead bodies lying in the streets. I shivered. The horror and tension were building up in me because the information was so limited and obscured.
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Wartawan Tempo sejak 1998. Menjelajah berbagai desk, antara lain ekonomi, nasional, kesehatan, sains, gaya hidup, dan investigasi. Sejak Januari 2009 ditugasi menjadi Direktur Eksekutif Institut Tempo, sebuah lembaga yang dicita-citakan menjadi pusat pengembangan jurnalistik di Indonesia. Lulusan Fakultas Biologi, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, tahun 1996. Setelah lulus kuliah, bergabung dengan Majalah Warta Ekonomi (1996) sebagai staf riset dan kemudian menjadi reporter di majalah Panji Masyarakat (1997).