Tsunami (Aceh, 2005)

When I first met Abang in Ubud, Bali, he was a party in a bottle, a fun-loving DJ with wildly colored hair, tattoos and piercings. We became unlikely friends, even at times crying on each others shoulders about love affairs gone wrong. As the years passed, I saw him mature into a deeply caring, intelligent and resourceful man who under the auspices of IDEP, a local NGO, met with village elders throughout Bali to help them understand disaster planning (Bali is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions).

After the deadly tsunami swept through Southeast Asia, killing hundreds of thousands, Abang found himself called into service by IDEP to help coordinate on-the-ground efforts to get aid fast to the stricken Aceh region of Sumatra. He interviewed medical personnel, building contractors and other Indonesian would-be volunteers who could communicate with the local populace. He probed to see if they could take the strain of living in the jungle in shacks with no niceties and little contact with the outside world for three months before their replacements arrived.

But one day when I called Abang on his cell phone, I found him not in Bali, but in the middle of the jungles of Aceh. I was immediately concerned for his safety, not just because of the fear of further earthquakes and tsunamis, but because of the fierce hostilities between Aceh rebels and the unrelenting Indonesian military.

There was “still a war going on,” Abang told me. “People come in with knife and bullet wounds, and sometimes the military comes to the clinic and questions us.” He told me there were “lots of heavy guns”.

He had brought three medical volunteers with him, and they were in the midst of building a wooden clinic. Although it was weeks after the tsunami had hit, he said there was still a lot of flooding, not helped by the fact that it rained almost continuously. He was keeping the infrastructure running, which included driving 10 hours over bad roads to pick up food.

Even though this particular clinic was mid-wife oriented, and even though it was still being built, all kinds of patients went (and still go) there. The volunteers treated people with injuries caused by the tsunami and its aftermath, and also people with long-standing problems who took advantage of the fact doctors had arrived in their midst. Malaria was a problem; the clinic was treating malarial patients when I spoke with Abang, but he didn’t seem concerned about catching it himself.

If you’ve ever spent time in Indonesia, you know that family members often accompany patients at the hospital, and the clinic was no different. At night, Abang said, when the relatives came, they had about 50 people staying all night there. He was obviously enjoying the experience deep in the jungle, talking with people who had been through so much and doing what he could to help.

Abang said, “Everyone has lost people, everyone has horrible stories, but the people are great and smiling and want to give you things even though they've lost everything. They are mostly rebuilding their villages themselves. Many NGOs come and run into a little adversity and quit and leave.”

He talked a lot about the children. “The kids don’t so much talk about their experiences as draw them,” he told me. “I can see the tsunami through their drawings.” He held a drawing contest, not tsunami-related, just a kids' drawing contest, but the children drew the horrors they had seen, of course. He put the drawings up on a wall....