First
her father said no. But Eka would not give in so easily.
She has been an Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) volunteer for two
years in Yogyakarta and felt she should go to Banda Aceh to
assist the population affected by December’s devastating
tsunami.
Finally her father gave in and now 22-year-old Eka will be in
Banda Aceh for two more weeks.
“It happened little by little. Finally my parents understood
that this work is not really dangerous,” Eka says with
a smile. Eka means “the first”, and she is the oldest
of four children.
She recently graduated from the Ahmad Dahlan-university in Yogyakarta,
having majored in English. “I like to read books in English,
I think English is the first international language in order
to be able to communicate properly,” she says.
When she goes back home, she would like to work as an English
teacher in a Senior High School. In her free time, Eka likes
to travel with her friends and climb mountains.
“We have climbed the highest mountain, Merbabu, close
to my home,” she explains.
Eka learned about the Indonesian Red Cross through a friend
when she was studying at the university. She thought it was
doing a good work and so decided to find out more about the
PMI and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in general.
And for the past two years, she has been one of the PMI’s
thousands of volunteers.
This is not her first time in Aceh. She was here in 2003 for
a meeting of PMI student volunteers. But this time is different
and it looks different, she says.
Eka sleeps and eats in the backyard of the PMI offices in Banda
Aceh together with the other PMI volunteers. Since she arrived
she has been working as a translator for the logisticians deployed
in the decimated town, facilitating the coordination between
the International Federation and the PMI.
She is also a PMI logistics administrator at the Toyota building
where the Federation and the PMI have shared facilities for
several weeks.
But the volunteers are also going out on a daily basis to recover
the dead bodies. When I ask her if she thinks that she and her
friends will have nightmares about that part of their work,
she immediately says no.
“It is a reality. When you realize that, it does not affect
you in a negative way,” she says.
And she says the same words I have heard from other PMI volunteers
before: “it is important to be able to help.”
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Indonesian
Red Cross volunteer Eka felt she had to go to Banda Aceh
to assist the tsunami-hit population (p12603)
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Eka
has been assisting the logistics teams in Aceh, working
as a translator and administrator (p12605)
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