Journey to Aceh

Monday evening, approaching midnight, 3 January 2005. We landed at Sultan Iskandar Muda Airport, Banda Aceh, after an approximately four-hour Adam Air flight. My heart was beating hard.

The airport was truly crowded and hectic. Dozens of cargo aircraft carrying aid supplies and passenger planes had to wait their turn before finally being allowed to land. An official even told me that his plane had to fly to Kuala Lumpur due to technical problems while in its holding pattern, awaiting its turn to land.

Thank God, our plane landed smoothly with no problems. Once on the ground we were immediately confronted by chaos, with many people in great agitation and panic. Reporters, volunteers, and NGO activists all spilled over the modest-sized airport. In several corners I saw women wearing high-heel shoes and bouffant hairdos. How they could find the time to make themselves up in that fashion baffled me.

Elsewhere in the airport people were sitting with aimless looks on their faces. It appeared they were local people looking for relatives, or wanting to get a flight back to Jakarta. Photocopies of snapshots of lost persons were pasted everywhere; the walls were also full of haphazard news like “Fulan is safe, heading for Jakarta” or “So and so is with uncle so and so”, or “Father is safe, brother John Doe is gone.”

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Early morning: 4 January 2005. After a simple breakfast at the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) headquarters, I immediately joined the Tempo Volunteer Team at the Governor’s Assembly Hall. We didn’t have a definite programme of work, and since ours was just a small team we decided to join other teams already in place. The National Disaster Relief Coordinating Team, known by its acronym Satkorlak, was the one we joined.

Besides distributing relief goods, particularly food and medicine, the Satkorlak Team concentrated on removing the numerous corpses. This was important because there were still so many out in the open.

Seeing the scattered dead bodies, with their pungent smell filling the air, everybody was bound to be deterred by this horrific situation. All of us were reaching for death at the end of a candle, said the late Jim Morrison of The Doors rock group. So simple—at the end of a candle.

The chaos in Banda Aceh at that time was indescribable. Piles of slimy garbage littered the whole city. On the streets, shoes could be seen everywhere, ownerless dolls, necklaces without necks. Every inch of soil seemed to hold its own sad story, of the fierce waves that swooped in faster than an aeroplane. Black marks, remnants of the inundation could be seen on the roofs of two-storey buildings. The tops of coconut trees too. Those who survived the calamity told of seeing miles and miles of waves retreating into the sea, and 15 minutes later lashing back into the land like giant cobras attacking in all directions with full force.

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In Japanese, “tsunami” mean swaves that come ashore to anchor. A beautiful, deferential term depicting the arrival of something full of tenderness, care and accommodating.

However, the waves that came ashore in the last week of 2004 in Aceh were definitely not tender. A tsunami once occurred during the eruption of Mount Krakatau in 1883 and had come ashore at Banyuwangi in Java and on Flores Island, and this time it demonstrated its very might. It was The Wave that scoured, dashed, chopped and forced everything and everyone into complete surrender.

Following the calamity, quite a number of articles and analyses had been written commenting on the savage disaster. All pointed out that the impact of the tsunami could have been averted. The arrival of the deadly waves was proclaimed by a loud thundering sound, followed by the sudden ebbing of the sea which would then sweep back ashore with extreme force. The scientists quoted in the articles were convinced that there was always a 15- to 30-minute lapse of time between an earthquake and the arrival of a tsunami; an interval long enough for people to leave the seashore and run to safety. An article in Tempo weekly even dared to state, “Even without expensive instruments, a tsunami and its impact can be avoided.”

Was that true? On the island of Simeuleu there was indeed a local custom in which people would immediately run to the hills after an earthquake. This custom, called smong, forbade people to approach the sea after an earthquake because it would usually be followed by the onslaught of big waves. It was indeed a miracle that the small island only lost six people; not hundreds, not thousands.

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Disaster tends to expose the best as well as the worst sides of people. That also happened when the tsunami occurred. Thousands of people came to render assistance. Thousands of victims bravely and strongly survived the ordeal. But at the same time there were those who took advantage of the situation, stealing the belongings of others.

Theft in the aftermath of a disaster doesn’t happen only in places like Aceh. Even in the prosperous country of the United States of America, where the flag of democracy is constantly raised, looting occurred. Hurricane Katrina that rampaged across Louisiana and Mississippi at the end of August 2005 also exposed the antics of looters amidst the hordes of panicking victims.

Public banners with warnings of “Looters will be shot” failed to prevent the looting, murder and incidents of rape that spread throughout New Orleans. The truth of the sudden surge of criminality amidst the disaster still needs to be verified as some of the hideous stories turned out to be just rumours. However, media photos clearly proved that looting in the midst of the hurricane in the US was not fallacy. It must be acknowledged that even in prosperous countries, people also have an unimaginable dark side.

Looting also occurred in our country. I met one man—let’s just call him Arief—in his thirties, who was in the middle of breaking into a locked shop in Banda Aceh. At first he knocked on the door and called out the shop owner’s name but there was no answer. Perhaps the owner had perished in the tsunami.

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Up to the second week after the tsunami, there were many disaster areas that had not been reached by the volunteers. Nias Island, Calang, Meulaboh, Lamno, Lhoong, Teunom, Panga, Krueng Sabe and many more other areas. In these isolated areas, thousands of survivors were still awaiting the arrival of assistance. They should certainly not be kept waiting any longer.

In collaboration with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), we attempted to approach those isolated areas. We decided on Lamno and Calang, both located in Aceh Jaya regency. At that time, due to television news and public information, many organizations were already racing to and reaching Meulaboh, but Lamno and Calang were still relatively neglected.

In “normal” times, the distance from Banda Aceh to Lamno and Calang could be covered by car in two hours at the most. However, after the tsunami, it was completely impossible to reach either city by road because dozens of bridges had been destroyed and many kilometres of asphalt roads had simply disappeared, swallowed up by the waves. One vital bridge that had been destroyed was the Lhok Nga bridge, at the other end of which were the barracks of the Army Combat Engineers, where hundreds of soldiers had been devoured by the waves, together with their weapons. A Singapore-flagged ship laden with coal had been dragged 50 metres inland.

Since the Lhok Nga bridge was destroyed, all we could do was try to obtain whatever information was available about conditions in the areas on the other side of the bridge. There were several settlements like Lhoong, Leupung, Lamno, Teunom, Calang and up to Meulaboh. Until the second week after the tsunami, no news or information could be obtained from those places. “Some friends crossed by foot to the other side, but there’s been no news from them till now,” said Taufik, a youth from the Green Camp, a club of young nature lovers based in Banda Aceh city.

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Before the tsunami, Lamno was a small town situated at the foot of a hill, not far from a beautiful bay. At the town’s centre was a thriving market, busy with fruit sellers, food and coffee stalls. At the beginning of every rainy season the market overflowed with typical fruits of the season like durian (also called the king of tropical fruits), rambutan, cempedak (a kind of jackfruit) and mangosteen. From the bay fishermen would wade ashore carrying crabs, a  variety of fish, and some would even carry lobsters. While from the hills, farmers would be pushing one or two carts of coffee beans. Indeed, for a long time Lamno coffee had been celebrated as one of the best coffees in Aceh. The most popular Solong brand of coffee in Banda Aceh came from the hills of this area.

It was at the market that Lamno’s economy evolved. It was also around the market that one could find the Post Office, Community Health Centre, the Telecommunication Office, an old inn, and a wooden building standing in a wide expanse of garden. Above all, Lamno was famous throughout the whole of Aceh as the cradle of beautiful girls. “When I was young I often went for short visits to Lamno, travelling by bus from Banda Aceh, looking for blue-eyed girls,” said Fahruradzie, a reporter from Aceh.

People said the fair-skinned and blue-eyed girls from Lamno were descendants of Portuguese sailors who were shipwrecked in this area in the 16th century. According to elders of the village, many of the shipwrecked newcomers settled and raised families along the shores of the area, not far from the foot of Grotee Hill. It was this area that was most severely devastated by the tsunami. At least 22 villages and their 8,000 inhabitants along the shores of Lamno disappeared from the map of Aceh.

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