Sitting
in the yard of the Indonesian Red Cross and International Federation’s
offices are 16 students.
They have come from different parts of Indonesia: Palang, East
Java, Jakarta and Sulawesi. Few have set foot in Banda Aceh
before.
They are trained SATGANA volunteers. SATGANA is the abbreviation
for the Disaster Preparedness Team, a key element in the Indonesian
Red Cross (PMI) response to the devastating tsunami that claimed
over 200,000 lives.
What they have seen during the past few weeks exceeds anything
they have seen before or could have expected. “It is totally
beyond everything you could imagine,” says 20-year-old
psychology student Aris Budiman, sitting on the warehouse floor
in his sarong.
On a daily basis, he says, he and his fellow PMI volunteers
are confronted with people who survived the tsunami and are
now suffering from their traumatic experiences.
On the holiday of the Hari Raya Idul Adha on Friday January,
21 most people were off work, but not the PMI volunteers. The
teams worked in shifts allowing them to adhere to the call for
prayers.
Seven other team members soon join us, all in their twenties.
There is Setiawan, who is studying engineering, Yuan who wants
to become a teacher and Muji, the only woman and a would-be
accountant. Akhmad is into statistics, Mirza from Jakarta studies
management and Otgman, like Setiawan, an engineering student.
And there is also Hamza, who is studying law. “I am all
stressed out,” he says, and they all laugh.
They are joking about how nice it is having a time off from
their studies. But they all say that the main reason for them
being there is that they are devoted to the Red Cross work.
The teams come to Banda Aceh to work for three weeks. After
that they go home and another team takes over. This team arrived
on January, 10.
There are several teams working at the same time and they all
perform different tasks. They take turns to be on stand by for
handing out relief goods at any time of the day or to go out
in the morning to the most affected areas to collect bodies.
Few had have ever seen a dead body before. The day before, this
team had collected 106 bodies.
“The first day we did it was very difficult. I could never
in my dreams have imagined anything like this. The first night
I was still collecting bodies in my dreams,” says Aris
Budman.
All the PMI (Palang Merah Indonesia) volunteers have access
to psychological counselling, and they use it, he says. They
also share their thoughts with the other team members as well.
But in spite of the challenges they are confronted with they
would not hesitate to do it all over again. “We feel that
what we are doing here is very important even when we are sometimes
confronted with difficult things,” they agree.
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Indonesian
Red Cross volunteers, Akhmad (front) and Otgman, have
come to Aceh as members of the SATGANA disaster response
teams (p12562)
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Distribution
centre at the Indonesian Red Cross head office in Banda
Aceh (p-IDN0199)
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PMI
volunteers load relief goods into trucks for distribution
in Banda Aceh (p-IDN0197)
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Like
her fellow SATGANA members, Muji has left her studies
to help the disaster-hit people of Aceh (p12563)
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