Journey to Aceh

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.

Download CHAPTER 3 – Weeks of Tension

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.”

Download CHAPTER 5 – A Very Exhausting Night

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.

Download CHAPTER 6 – Army of Body Hunters

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.

Download CHAPTER 7 – Waves That Come to Anchor