As you drive west of Banda Aceh, through the splintered streets, you soon reach the groves of palm trees that flank the scarred road but fail to conceal the devastation on either side. You keep the vehicle’s windows up to shut out the smell of the thousands of bodies that still lie, unclaimed and unidentified, under the rubble, the thick silt, the smashed timber and the standing, stagnant saltwater.
A kilometre short of the broken bridge that is now the end of the road, there is a path. To one side, in a 15ft by 10ft tent supplied by the Red Cross and shared with 20 others, you will find Wanti Saddiah.
Saddiah is short, broad-hipped and broad-faced, with gaps in her teeth, lank hair and bandages on her jaw, arms and legs. She is wearing a purple sarong and a filthy pink T-shirt with ‘Dream’ across it. She speaks very softly. Outside the tent, in the patchy shade of the palm trees, unkempt, semi-naked children shout and scream and laugh too loudly, and then fall suddenly silent. The story Saddiah tells is — with minor variations — that of many tens of thousands of Indonesians. At the last count, the country lost 98Â 000 people on Boxing Day.
She starts by talking about the beach at Lhok Nga, the village where she lived all her life. It is a long strip of tropical sand, fringed by slender trees. Saddiah was born 35 years ago in a basic, wooden house that her parents were still living in when the wave struck. She and her sister, Suriana, used to play hide and seek on the beach after school. Though Suriana was seven years younger than Saddiah, the two were close, the only girls of eight children. As she speaks, a small degree of animation lights Saddiah’s previously blank features and expressionless eyes. Her voice remains a flat monotone, though she brushes aside any offer to end the interview.
Saddiah’s father was a rice farmer, she says, a “hard-working, nice old man who wouldn’t harm a flea”. Her mother, despite a life of often hard labour, was still active, though “slowing down a bit”. They lived on a crowded street set back from the beach and the main street.
Saddiah married a friend of her brother in 1990. Six years older, he was a grocer. The couple scraped together their savings and built a brick house a few yards from Saddiah’s parents’ home. A year after their wedding, their first son, Afwan Rizal, was born. For the next 14 years, her life was uneventful. The shop provided just enough money for the family. A brother died of cancer. They saved up and bought a scooter. A second son, Adi Ansyah, was born in 1997.
Occasionally Saddiah and some friends would take off for a few days to Medan, the nearest big city, 480km away. “We’d go window shopping, strolling around, having fun,” she said. When Suriana got married, the two went to Medan to buy new clothes to celebrate. Though married, Suriana stayed with her parents to look after them, as Acehnese custom dictates.
Saddiah’s children grew up. There was trouble with the eldest, who by his early teens had fallen into bad company and was playing truant. No such problems arose with her younger son, who won a scholarship to secondary school last year. But both boys loved football, which they played at Lhok Nga sports club. Even if Afwan spent half his time with “good-for-nothings”, at least the boys were happy. “We all used to go swimming every Sunday,” Saddiah remembers.
Rising slowly, she walks over to a pile of boxes of noodles and cartons of water supplied by aid agencies. Many of the instant refugee camps that have sprung up in recent days lack supplies. Though there are tens of thousands of tonnes of rice, noodles, fuel, clothes and tarpaulins at the choked and chaotic airport on the outskirts of Banda Aceh and in the city’s warehouses, the distribution networks have yet to be properly organised, hamstrung by a shortage of trucks.
Damage to roads and bridges has meant many other areas are inaccessible except by helicopter, and although up to 40 aircraft are now in operation — the bulk flying from the US naval battle group just offshore — thousands of tsunami victims are still without any help. At the airport, dozens of groups — ranging from Spanish medics to Japanese rescue workers — have set up depots and logistics bases with little co-ordination. No one knows how many homeless people there are: estimates range from 300Â 000 to 800Â 000. Last week the Indonesian Minister for Social Welfare said that new camps would be built to house refugees semi-permanently.
Elsewhere, aid efforts are being hampered by corruption. In some cases, dead families are being signed up to receive rice. There are limited officials to enforce order — hundreds of local administrators died in the disaster. And, according to Ito Samardi, a police brigadier flown in from Jakarta, there are now only 900 police men in the affected areas, too few to provide proper security. More than 1Â 000 officers are thought to have been killed.
Saddiah picks out bottled water from a box and offers it, apologising for not having anything else, and then resumes her story. On Christmas Day, she says, Adi, her seven-year-old, said he had had a bad dream. To comfort him, Saddiah said she would stay at home the next morning, instead of opening the shop as usual, and cook a big meal. At about 8am the next day, the Wantia family — parents, two sons, Suriana the younger sister — gathered for a special breakfast. A late arrival was Saddiah’s husband, who had been on a camping trip with his brother-in-law. Though the two men had already eaten, they sat down anyway, joking about how fat they would get. Then the ground started shaking.
All along the thin ribbon of inhabited land that rings Sumatra, the same scene was playing out — and in the rest of the region, too. Tens of thousands of people stopped the very ordinary things that they were doing and waited as the massive earthquake passed. The ordinary was about to end.
Though in Banda Aceh itself large buildings collapsed, Lhok Nga was largely unscathed. Scared but relieved, the Wantia family looked around and collectively shrugged. Afwan Rizal, the errant eldest boy, told his mother he was going to meet his friends and disappeared. The others started clearing their meal away. They started hearing shouts. The sea had receded. No one knew exactly what it meant. But everyone knew it was bad. And then Saddiah heard new shouts, first warning, then full of terror, turning to screams: “The sea is coming. A wave is coming.”
The Sumatran coast was so close to the epicentre of the tsunami that the water blasted up the beaches in a single massive onslaught. Only from the air does the true extent of the destruction become clear. When you drive the length of the east coast, the damage appears patchy. In fact, a strip about a mile deep along the shoreline had been so smashed that almost nothing survived. But on the ground it was impossible to gauge the damage. Later, from one of the first United States Navy helicopters to fly relief missions to the more inaccessible areas, the true power of the waves became clear. Where the jungled mountains fell directly into the sea, an orange-brown scar, 50m high, ran above the now quiet sea.
Where rivers met the sea, the destruction plunged inland, carving a swath through forest, village and field alike, showing where tens of thousands of tonnes of water, moving at the speed of an express train, had been funnelled by the land’s contours. As for the settlements, such as Lokh Nga, nothing remained. All that distinguished the sites of the towns and fishing villages were the flat, rectangular, concrete floors of the better-constructed houses. Poorer dwellings, such as that of Saddiah’s parents, were wiped off the face of the earth, sucked back into the sea when the great wave receded.
Saddiah talks in the blank, flat tones of the utterly traumatised. “First I heard the noise,” she says. “Like a huge truck or aeroplane very close. I turned round and saw a huge wall of water. It was as big as the houses and was moving very fast.” Her brother-in-law picked up her youngest son and began to run. Saddiah’s parents stood without moving. Saddiah reached for her husband and her younger sister. Holding hands, the three faced the wave. The moment the water struck them, they were separated.
Saddiah has no idea of what happened over the next minutes as she was hurled inland, then hauled back out again. She prayed over and over again for salvation. “I told Allah that I would be devoted all my life if I was saved,” she says. “Suddenly I came to the surface and took a huge breath and grasped a piece of wood.”
Around her were dozens of other people in the water. She could see the dome of the mosque near her home above the water. She screamed for help — but none came. “No one cared about me. No one cared about anyone else,” Saddiah says. “I had blood all over me because I was hit in the face by a bit of tin roofing. Finally I begged someone, begging them again and again to help me and they helped me swim to the mosque and clamber onto it. And I stayed there until the waters dropped. And then all I could see were bodies.”
No one knows yet how many people were killed. Late last week, the Indonesian government said 113Â 000 people had died in Aceh, but then it lowered the figure to 98Â 000. The error was the result of information misunderstood over a static-filled radio from Meulaboh, once a bustling little town in the centre of Sumatra’s west coast. Last Friday more than 5Â 000 corpses were found in the disaster zone, the vast majority in Meulaboh. The bodies, putrid after 11 days in tropical conditions, were gathered by volunteer teams. Many teams consist of local villagers who returned to their obliterated homes to search for neighbours and families. But many others are from outside Aceh — from Java or even further afield — and have come because they want to help.
Led by the military, they fan out every morning through the worst-hit areas, hauling out a grisly crop of dozens of corpses. Last Wednesday the harbour area of Banda Aceh itself had just been opened up to the teams. There was so much work that at least one group ran out of body bags. They were crouched beside a pile of nearly a dozen corpses, calmly smoking and talking while they waited for more bags to be brought to them. Another dozen bodies floated in the river beside them. One local, who had just returned to his home, walked over. “There’s a body in my house,” he told the leader of the group. “It’s a woman. That’s all I can tell.”
Saddiah was spared such horrors. In profound shock, she remained on the roof of the mosque until men from an inland village reached Lokh Nga. They put up ladders, brought her down and carried her back to their houses. There she found her eldest son — who had wandered off to find his friends minutes before the wave struck. He was unharmed. But there was no sign of anyone else in her family. “I was so happy to see him,” Saddiah says. “I thought I had lost everything.” The two remained in the village for two days, until the first Indonesian rescue workers reached it. Early relief efforts were less haphazard than previously reported, with many local institutions, such as the army and the police, responding to the tsunami rapidly and efficiently.
In Saddiah’s case, locals took her to the military hospital in Banda Aceh. There she found her eldest brother — who himself was looking for his wife. Saddiah, her brother and her son were all that remained of the family. Her parents were killed; Suriana, her feisty little sister, too. Five brothers. Her husband. And, of course, her son, who had just won his scholarship to “big school”. She moved to the refugee camp. It is as close as she can get to her village.
Saddiah falls silent. She still appears without emotion. There are no gestures of grief, no tears, no obvious signs of sorrow. She barely notices the strangely raucous children around her. They, like their parents, are in grave need of psychological help. Little is available. The British government is aware of the problem. “There will be massive trauma here,” said Hilary Benn, the Minister for International Development, standing in front of a consignment of UK aid. “The solution has to be an Indonesian one because local people are best equipped in terms of culture and language to deal with it.”
The persistent aftershocks — one registered 5,9 last week — do not help.
Benn was one of a series of ministers who saw the devastation in Aceh at first hand last week. They included Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, and the head of the World Bank.
Saddiah remained by her tent throughout. In the morning, when it is cool, she sits outside, watching the other families cook and eat and argue. Almost all have lost relatives, though few as many as her. By eleven o’clock, when the tropical sun starts to burn through the paltry cover of the palm trees, she moves back into the tent. “Now my job is to be a good mother to my son and manage on my own,” she says. “There is nothing else.” – Guardian Unlimited Â