After
the tsunami Indonesian Red Cross volunteers set up camp kitchens
and distributed tents, and delivered relief goods to half a
million survivors. They have conducted hygiene training, helped
produce over one million litres of drinking water per day, organized
community reconstruction meetings, and daily continue the work
of helping tsunami survivors put their lives together again.
But before most of this, these highly trained and dedicated
young people – many of them tsunami survivors themselves
– had the toughest job of all: the recovery and final
care of tens of thousands of bodies.
It was the night calls which were the hardest, the most terrible
and frightening.
To describe what a night call meant, Mirza – a 24-year-old
Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) volunteer – makes a silent
gesture of going over a mountain and back. He doesn’t
need to say more. Anyone here would know what he means –
especially Mirza’s friends sprawled with him this evening
on the floor of this small Red Cross outpost, playing too rough
and listening to loud music. Like young people anywhere.
Mirza and his friends joined the Red Cross in Calang on the
west coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province in 2002. They
wanted to be heroes, to rescue people from danger and save lives.
At that same time, the conflict between separatists and government
forces was escalating. A state of emergency was declared and
Aceh province was closed to outsiders.
The town where Mirza lived was close to the worst area of the
conflict, and so, even though he and his friends had been enthusiastic
students in Red Cross’ advanced rescue and relief training,
fate had another job in mind for them. They were assigned to
team “evacuasi” - a unit responsible for the recovery
and care of the dead. Mirza was made captain of the team.
Mirza is lean with the broad, rounded shoulders of someone used
to hard work. He has the face of someone used to great responsibility
and the eyes of someone who has seen the worst.
“Too many to count,” he says of the dead bodies
he tended during the conflict.
Fifty? One hundred? Two? Mirza nods slowly after 500.
The call usually came from someone in a village in the mountainous
heart of North Sumatra Island. If the call came at night, the
off-duty team would often join to give moral support, something
that made Mirza very proud. The two teams would drive their
ambulances past checkpoints into the darkened mountains. The
dead could wait until daylight, perhaps, but not the grieving
relatives or friends.
When the teams arrived as close as could be driven, they would
unload stretchers and hike the rest of the way through jungle
and night. They would recover the bodies and then bring them
some place to be buried with dignity.
“We had to do it,” says Mirza. “If we didn’t
who else would? The bodies would be there forever.”
The work is difficult, say the volunteers like Mirza, but not
dirty. “It is about taking care of people,” says
one.
For Mirza, it is about the community. “According to our
culture,” he says “if a body lies in a village and
no one dares to recover it, then the whole village is guilty
of a sin.”
But, in the highly suspicious environment of a conflict, even
tending to a dead body can be seen as show of support for one
side or another. The recognized neutrality of the Red Cross
allowed Mirza and his team an uneasy safe-passage, but did not
make the work any less terrible or frightening.
So, when the phone rang on the night of December 25th, 2004,
Mirza expected the worst. This time, however, the call was about
life. Two lives. A pregnant woman was having trouble delivering
her child. Mirza’s ambulance would take the woman and
two midwives to a hospital in a town a few hours away.
About an hour down the narrow and jarring coastal road, Mirza
had to call for the driver to stop. A few minutes later, Mirza
and the midwives helped the woman safely deliver a baby boy.
It was what Mirza had trained and hoped for, the opportunity
to save lives.
Mirza brought the woman and baby to the midwife post and then
returned to the PMI office at 4:30am. He smiled as he drifted
to sleep on a mat on the office floor. Two lives.
At 8:09am, the earthquake literally jolted Mirza awake. He and
the rest of his team ran outside into the road. The quake shook
the town and the seaside building for 10 minutes. When it was
over, the town’s small, low buildings seemed to be fine
and intact. Mirza and his friends returned to the yard of the
Red Cross post and began to fool around collecting fallen mangoes.
Minutes later, people in the street began praying loudly or
screaming and running. Startled and confused, Mirza ran to find
his parents. When he saw the wave, he sent them by motorcycle
to a nearby hill and ran. On the hill, he heard the wave hitting
the trees behind him and climbed a mango tree and hung on for
life.
From the mango tree, he was able to pull two men to safety and
rescued a five-year-old boy. After the third big wave, the water
subsided and he carried the boy on his shoulders up the hill
where the injured were already collecting. He found his parents
safe.
Mirza and two other Red Cross volunteers treated the wounded
on the hilltop in a makeshift rescue post. He used a sharp stick
to open coconuts and give the fluid to those gravely ill from
swallowing too much sea water.
“We believed it was the end of the world,” says
Mirza. “But the next morning when the sun rose, we knew
it was only a disaster.”
For the next two days and nights, Mirza and the others went
without food or water as they tended the wounded and began helping
recover the dead. On the third day, Mirza decided to walk with
other townspeople more than 120 kilometers up the coast to the
capital city of Banda Aceh where they all had family and hoped
to find help. “We thought maybe the tsunami had only happened
to our town.”
As Mirza’s group walked, the scope of the disaster began
to sink in. “Where there used to be houses and beautiful
trees, there was nothing. Just rubble and bodies.” They
found survivors who joined them on their grisly march.
At night, the group stayed in the hills above the coast, afraid
of another tsunami. They survived on coconuts and the roasted
meat of cows they found in the hills. In the day, their feet
bled as they walked. They prayed silently as they walked, and
when they talked, it was only about the big wave and finding
their families in Banda Aceh.
On the fifth day of walking along the tsunami-ravaged coast,
they met another group of people walking the opposite direction
from Banda Aceh. The group said that the water had hit the capital,
too.
On the 12th day, Mirza’s group arrived where the town
of Loknga which once stood just south of the city. “When
I saw all that stood was the mosque, that everything else was
gone, I lost all hope. From a survivor, Mirza then learned that
the tsunami had completely destroyed the neighbourhood of his
relatives. When he arrived, he found none had survived.
Mirza stayed the night in a refugee camp. He joined the Banda
Aceh PMI team the next day and set to the work he already knew
too well for a young man – the recovery and care of tens
of thousands of dead bodies left by the tsunami.
Within a couple of months, Mirza and hundreds of volunteers
from all over Indonesia would have collected – and in
some cases identified – and buried over 60,000 bodies.
When he finally returned to his hometown, some of those who
had volunteered with him were dead. The two midwives he’d
ridden with in the night before the tsunami were missing. Someone
had witnessed a Red Cross team frantically loading the new mother
and her newborn baby boy into an ambulance. The wave broadsided
them as they fled, and the two lives Mirza saved were taken
back four hours after first acquaintance.
Tonight in this small Red Cross post, Mirza and his young friends
horseplay and laugh too loud and savour staying up a few hours
too late. Just as they should.
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Mirza
– a 24-year-old Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) volunteer
– joined the Red Cross in Calang on the west coast
of Indonesia’s Aceh province in 2002. He and his
friends wanted to be heroes, to rescue people from danger
and save lives.
Photo: Virgil Grandfield/International Federation (p13616)
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“We
believed it was the end of the world,” says Mirza.
“But the next morning when the sun rose, we knew
it was only a disaster.”
Photo: Yoshi Shimizu/International Federation (p-IDN0255)
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Within
a couple of months, Mirza and hundreds of volunteers from
all over Indonesia would have collected – and in
some cases identified – and buried over 60,000 bodies.
Photo: Yoshi Shimizu/International Federation (p-IDN0250)
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|
|
 |
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|
After
the tsunami Indonesian Red Cross volunteers set up camp
kitchens and distributed tents, and delivered relief goods
to half a million survivors. They have conducted hygiene
training, helped produce over one million litres of drinking
water per day, organized community reconstruction meetings,
and daily continue the work of helping tsunami survivors
put their lives together again.
Photo: Yoshi Shimizu/International Federation (p-IDN0233)
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