Six
long-armed excavator tractors were still searching for bodies
where part of the village of Batugajar once stood.
The crowds of a few days ago had grown smaller and the TV cameras
all but evaporated. But the young Indonesian Red Cross (PMI)
volunteers were standing by to recover the next body and deliver
it by stretcher to the village mosque.
A week ago, a mountain of garbage and mud swept more than a
kilometre down this pretty valley of rice paddies and tiny villages,
burying at least 70 homes and killing at least 143 people.
Five kilometres on, on the far side of the valley, lies lonelier
Cirindu, where we heard only a few people had died in the avalanche.
Here there were no crowds, just a single excavator slowly scraping
a trench down to where a narrow village lane had been.
Standing on the brown stream of toxic runoff, that reeked of
rot and ammonia, were two young Red Cross volunteers waiting
with hand tools to gingerly finish digging out the last body
at Cirundu when the time came.
There was only one other person on the lava-like flow: a small,
young man in a bright white shirt.
His name was Tiswa Chubariat. He and his family lived here in
Cirundu. It wasn’t much of a life by most standards, but
they had a home and one another.
Tiswa and his brothers were “pemulung” - garbage
scavengers who picked a living out of the garbage mountain -
one bit of plastic, copper or aluminium at a time.
An eight-hour day earned 15,000 rupiahs, enough to buy a third
of a 500 ml bottle of drinking water at a hotel in the city
which had created Garbage Mountain. “It’s not enough,”
Tiswa says through two interpreters - from his native tongue
into Indonesian and then into my own.
Many of Tiswa’s friends worked the top of Garbage Mountain
at night to try to make “enough.” At least 13 of
them probably died instantly around 2 am on Monday 22 February,
when a huge explosion of inherent compressed ammonium –
superheated by the added pressure of three days of heavy, cool
rain - caused the mountain to collapse into a massive avalanche.
It felt like an earthquake, says the young pemulung, but sounded
like a violent thunderstorm. When his mother pulled him and
his younger brother from bed, the three of them ran out of the
house towards a rice paddy. Tiswa’s father and two older
brothers ran out another door, up the narrow lane going to the
village.
All Tiswa could see of the avalanche were huge fireballs of
escaping methane. Before he and his mother and little brother
could run 10 steps, the dense wall of foul mud and garbage destroyed
their house. An instant later, it caught all three of them.
The flow lifted Tiswa and carried him another 150 metres. When
it stopped, Tiswa found himself buried to his neck, battered
but alive. Three men from the village found Tiswa and dug him
out. Then they found his mother and younger brother, also buried
to their necks, but also alive.
Tiswa Chubariat points to a large pit behind the excavator.
There had been 26 people in his extended family. Red Cross volunteers
and others had dug up 20 of them from 10 houses in the large
pit. In the trench in front of us, they found Tiswa’s
father and oldest brother where they had tried to run up the
narrow lane to the village.
Tiswa’s brother Rusdaya - a quiet, 26-year-old who took
care of their mother - had run with them. He is the last of
a family that lived and died by a mountain of garbage - the
last body in Cirindu yet to be found.
Each moment the digging continues, Tiswa will watch carefully
for his brother. If and when Rusdaya is found, Tiswa says he,
his mother and little brother will be able to think about another
home. Somewhere, he hopes, far away from here.
Within an hour of hearing about the disaster at the garbage
mountain, a Red Cross team of 13 young disaster response (Satgana)
volunteers from nearby Cilimus arrived in Cirindu to help recover
the dead and care for the living – as they had just done
for a month in the faraway tsunami-affected regions of Aceh
province.
The volunteers took public transport, rode motor scooters or
hitch-hiked to Cirindu, while the team leader rented a vehicle
to carry the team’s one cooking pot and gas burner. By
lunchtime, these 13 kids had used their one pot to cook for
1,000 refugees and workers, as well as relatives coming for
news of their loved ones.
By suppertime, with an extra pot and burner, the Cilimus Satgana
team was cooking for 2,000, as they would twice a day for the
next week.
To these volunteers, Banda Aceh and Cirindu are in the same
frame. They help wherever help is needed, even if they have
to hitchhike to get there.
“There is no difference between a tsunami victim and a
landslide victim,” says the head of the International
Federation’s tsunami operation in Indonesia, Bernd Schell.
“These are the same, poor, pure people.”
Schell says part of the money collected for tsunami relief will
go to replenish some stocks the Indonesian Red Cross used for
the tsunami that might otherwise have gone to the victims of
disasters such as last week’s garbage slide.
Maybe volunteer teams like the Cilimus Satganas might get an
extra cooking pot and something to carry it, too.
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Indonesian
Red Cross volunteer Masun looks out at the disaster site,
where a mountain of garbage and earth engulfed a number
of villages (p12641).
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Enda’s
home was one of 70 destroyed by the deadly landslide.
Enda lost her parents and must now raise her four-year-old
brother, Jaya, alone. Red Cross volunteers have been feeding
and caring for them (p12643).
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Red
Cross volunteers and nursing students attend to woman
who fainted after learning that 17 members of her family
had perished in the disaster (p12644).
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Indonesian
Red Cross disaster response volunteers recover a body
from the landslide (picture: Agus Karyono, PMI) (p12645).
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